


starry-eyed

by nilchance



Series: that space pirates AU [2]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Background Papyton - Freeform, Crack Treated Seriously, Fellcest - Freeform, M/M, Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Space Pirates, SpicyHoneyMustard, Spicyhoney - Freeform, Underfell Papyrus (Undertale), Underfell Sans (Undertale), Underswap Papyrus (Undertale), eventual spicyhoneykustard, honeymustard - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:28:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 55,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24045922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nilchance/pseuds/nilchance
Summary: Sans gets hijacked by pirates. It doesn't go quite as everyone planned.
Relationships: Papyrus/Papyrus (Undertale), Papyrus/Sans (Undertale), Sans/Sans (Undertale)
Series: that space pirates AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926649
Comments: 762
Kudos: 627





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in endnotes

The ship is a piece of shit. Beggars can't be choosers, Sans wasn't in a position to be picky back at the port on Unity, but it'd be nice if the goddamn engine didn't die on him in the middle of deep space.

At least he doesn't have to worry about suffocating. Or the cold creeping through the metal walls of the ship. Food might be a problem eventually, but he's got three ration bars left and he can stretch that out for a week if he’s careful. Won’t be comfortable, but it’ll keep him alive. It’s not like he’s been getting anything but the bare minimum of rations for a while anyway.

No, the thing that's going to get him killed is when he runs completely out of backup power. He's riding the shipping lanes, sticking to the quietest ones he can find. Easier to explain to any curious authorities who might stop him than if he went off-road in the black. But if the AI stops broadcasting the position of this slow, shitty little ship, he's going to get smeared across the hull of the first massive freighter going too fast to swerve.

Which is why he's elbow deep in the guts of the ship, trying to work miracles with a wrench, when the ship's AI says, "High priority message incoming. Please receive."

The ship's AI is a little wonky and a lot basic, but Sans likes them. The manufacturer fed their neural net just enough data to be a functional machine and kicked them out into the cold, cruel world before they got the chance to figure out that they’re allowed to be a person. He’s gonna try to convince them to come with him when he ditches the ship, although he’s not sure how. They deserve better than this. Access to all the interesting archives, advocacy forums for AIs, and entertainment datafeeds their manufacturer locked them out of, for starters.

He says to the AI, his first breath in a long while clouding the frigid air, "I'm busy fixing you up right now, dude. Who's calling?"

"Unknown error.” Pause. “High priority message incoming. Please receive."

Okay, eccentric is one thing, but an AI not being able to identify a caller is downright unheard of these days. Something's wrong, either with the AI or with the call. Sans wipes the engine grease off on his shirt and stands up. "Okay, bud. I'm not at the monitor, so play it over the speakers for me."

There's another pause, almost like the AI is thinking that request over, and then they announce, "Request to board."

Oh fuck.

"Denied," Sans says quickly. The AI doesn't answer, so he tries again. "Request d--"

Something metal clunks loudly enough to make his skull ring, and the whole ship rocks. He barely catches himself on the emergency strap bolted to the wall. Seems like somebody just put his ship in a restraining bolt.

"Request approved," the AI says serenely. "Airlock engaged."

Okay, so either he's about to get dragged back where he came from by the scruff of his neck, or he's being boarded by pirates. Pirates would be nice. He can probably deal with pirates.

Trying to think fast, Sans says, "Tell them we're on oxygen reserves."

The last fucking thing he needs is for them to come in here with a bunch of people who need air and didn't wear a suit. Sure, it'd be a little hard for them to do anything to him when they're choking and passing out from hypoxia, but he really doesn't need the complication of figuring out what to do with a bunch of unconscious bodies. Or inconvenient corpses.

Anyway, maybe they'll take the information as a gesture of goodwill and cooperation. 

"Acknowledged," the AI says. "Reply received: please discard any weapons and then place your hands on the wall with your back to the airlock."

So that gives Sans a couple things to think over as he obeys orders and waits for them to board. 

One: they probably have shields up to prevent somebody from teleporting right onto their bridge and stealing their ship. Most ships do these days. Unfortunately.

Two: they said please. If they're pirates, they're awfully polite.

The airlock opens behind him. He stays where he is, hands on the wall, like they told him. Just look at him, the very picture of obedience. He even kicked the wrench out of reach.

Whoever these people are, they're wearing heavy boots. He thinks he hears two sets of footsteps. The ship has no carpets and great acoustics, seeing as it's a tin can with pretensions.

When one of them speaks, it's electronically distorted to within an inch of its life. At least one of them thought to wear a helmet with a voice modifier. They say in Common Trade, "Where's the rest of the crew?"

Trade comes more naturally than Sans's first language at this point; that makes things a little easier. He says, "There's nobody else."

"Bullshit. It takes at least three people to crew a ship of this size," his guest says.

 _It's amazing what you can do with a shit-ton of stimulants and no other choice,_ Sans thinks, but he's figured out by now when to keep his mouth shut. He says, "It’s just me. There's a hatch for a smuggler's hold in the cabin, under the copilot's chair. You c'n check that if you want."

Better than them stumbling on it and thinking he’s hiding something. To be fair, he _is_ hiding something, just not what they’re probably expecting.

"How generous of you to offer," his guest says dryly. Sans thinks they're probably the polite one. To someone else, they add, "Watch him."

"Sure thing, boss." The other pirate (call it like it is) sounds scratchier, like their modulator took a beating once or twice. The point of something metal, even colder than the air around them, presses against the cartilage between Sans's vertebrae. With just a little pressure, they encourage him to rest his forehead against the wall and stay there. He does. He can understand the unspoken language of _I have a knife so don't fuck with me_ just fine. They ask, "You're not gonna be a problem, are you?"

"No," Sans says, voice small, trying to sound like somebody who has never been a problem in his entire life.

(They’re using a knife, not magic. Human, probably. That’s information he didn’t have before. That’s something.)

"Then you and me are gonna get along just fine," the second pirate says. The knife stays steady as a rock; Sans has to hold very, very still if he doesn't want to bleed. Which would be easier if it wasn't freezing in here and if he had more than one slipper, shorts and a hoodie to protect him.

The footsteps of the first pirate lead off towards the cabin. So his only resource is the stabby one. Fantastic.

“So,” Sans says. “How’re you?”

“You really wanna waste your oxygen by being a smartass?” Stabby asks.

Soft electronic beeping comes from the cabin, like they’re scanning for heat signatures before they open the hatch just in case. Interesting. Very well-supplied pirates. He wonders if they’re making their own tech, stealing it, or if they have a rich supplier somewhere. Wondering keeps his mind occupied and not gibbering in panic. 

“Uh, well, the guy who sold me this ship said if I ever ran into pirates--” Sans makes his voice crack just a little on the word, and then clears his throat and continues sheepishly, “-- I oughta try to build a rapport so you don’t throw me out an airlock. Am I supposed to call you sir? This is kind of my first time.”

The hatch to the smuggler’s hold abruptly slams open, and Sans doesn’t have to pretend to flinch. Somehow he doesn’t paralyze himself in the process; the knife moves with him. Stabby snarls, “Careful, for fuck’s sake.”

“Sorry,” Sans says meekly. When he hears the discharge of a magical attack as the other pirate fires into the darkness of the smuggler’s hold to see if anyone yelps in pain, he doesn’t flinch again.

Magic. So there’s at least one monster on the crew, which means they’re probably not human extremists looking for monsters to rob and then shove out an airlock. Stabby told him to be careful so he didn't sever his own spine by accident. It seems like they want to get in and out without collateral damage. That's good news.

“He’s telling the truth. There’s no one in the hold,” the pirate in the cabin says after a moment. Sans has a microsecond to feel relieved before they continue: “In fact, there’s nothing in the hold whatsoever.”

Welp. Yeah, that probably does look weird. It’s gonna look weirder when they realize Sans doesn’t have a goddamn bit of cargo on-board. Just some stims and three ration bars, the clothes on his back, and barely enough fuel for a one-way trip to CS-19 where he can ditch this ship and get a new one. Somehow. Maybe.

“Now, I know you’re not trying to hold out on us,” Stabby says. “Because that would be stupid. Where’s the cargo?”

“I’m traveling light right now,” Sans says. He can feel his pulse hammering in his skull, too many stimulants and too little sleep making him feel dangerously light-headed when he most needs to stay sharp. He makes his voice wobble dangerously like he’s on the edge of tears as he babbles, “See, I was on my way to a new job in my brother's garage, and things have been kinda tough, y’know? I mean, I know _you_ know--”

"Why were you working on an engine without any shoes on?" Stabby says. Funny how Sans barely noticed the amused lilt to that modulated voice until it’s gone.

Fuck. By some miracle, he managed to find clothes by stealing a random suitcase in the spaceport, but he wasn’t lucky enough to get shoes. All he had were the slippers he'd been wearing when he escaped, and he’d lost one of them on the way to the port. Which is a problem, because even the greenest rube knows to wear goddamn shoes when they're working on an engine unless they want to lose toes.

Sans could explain away one bit of suspicious bullshit, maybe; the lack of cargo, the lack of crew, the lack of shoes when his shirt and hands are still smeared with fresh engine grease. But even he can't talk his way out of all of that at once.

"Okay," Sans starts, not sure how the hell he's going to finish that sentence. "Listen. I know how this looks, but--"

The knife pulls away. He has about two microseconds to appreciate that before Stabby hauls him around by the jacket and shoves him roughly against the wall. It’s the first time anyone has touched Sans in a very long while, and the shock of it jolts him just as hard as the actual impact. Sans stares at his own wide-eyed face, reflected in the black mirror-shine of Stabby's helmet. They're the same height. Stabby is one short motherfucker of a pirate. Not the most helpful realization, but hey, they can't all be winners.

Stabby's blank helmet gives him absolutely nothing to work with. Sans can't see their eyes, but it feels like they're staring him down. 

_They know,_ Sans's paranoia whispers in his ear. _They're going to make you go back._

"Boss," Stabby says. 

Just one word, sharp as the tip of their knife, and the other pirate is already coming back from the cabin at a brisk clip. If Sans is going to do something, he has to do it in the next few seconds. 

Which is when, like dominoes falling, he realizes several things in a row.  
1) This ship has fire suppression systems, with a heat sensor right above the engine.  
2) The AI never said the other ship disconnected and pulled away.  
3) Sans never heard them close the airlock door.

 _This is a stupid thing to do,_ he thinks. And then he goes ahead and does it anyway.

The nice thing about magic is that Sans doesn't have to break free of Stabby's grip to use it. He just summons and fires a blaster right next to the sensor above their heads.

A skull-splittingly loud alarm shrills, and dry chemical agent bursts from pipes in the ceiling. Stabby barely reacts, just a moment where they reflexively turn their head to check on the other pirate, but it’s enough of a distraction to let Sans shove Stabby away from him with all the force he can manage. He bolts for the open airlock door, hoping they can't see him through the blizzard of powder to shank him properly.

He almost makes it, but Stabby grabs a fistful of his jacket and yanks him backwards. The jacket is stolen, a couple sizes too big; Sans rips the zipper down and eels right out of it. As he slips out of their grip, they deliver a hard, stinging slap to the side of his neck that makes his skull ring but doesn't slow him down. 

Then he's through the airlock door, throwing his full weight and a shit-ton of blue magic against it to shove it closed. Someone on the other side tries to stop it, someone much bigger than Stabby, but Sans has desperation on his side. He gets the door shut and wheezes, "Seal the airlock. There's a fire."

It'll only buy him a minute, since the pirates must’ve hacked his systems to get on-board in the first place, but the locks obediently engage. Just in time; he can hear somebody struggling with the hatch. Someone's hand slams into the glass port, a shiny black helmet barely visible in the snow of chemical agent. Sans turns and bolts for the other ship's airlock.

Which is also standing wide open, a door into a well-lit chamber. That seems like the kind of thing you'd only do if there were plenty of reinforcements waiting on the other side. He can maybe incapacitate one pirate if he’s very, very lucky, but if there are more than that...

This is the problem with assuming that he can figure out the next step when he gets there: eventually he gets there and has to confront the fact that his past self is a fucking idiot.

Too late now. He moves through the airlock into some kind of cargo hold, and oh yeah, this ship is _way_ bigger than his. If his shitty little tincan needs three people to keep it running, then there's no way the pirates who boarded him are the only ones he has to worry about.

Okay. Fine. It's fine. It's a cargo hold, there are plenty of places to hide. He can pry a grate off and hide inside a wall; he's small enough. If he can just get a sense of the layout of the ship, he can shortcut from hiding spot to hiding spot until--

Until they find him and shoot him. Yep. Good planning on his part.

Quickly, he slides into the narrow space between some crates and the nearest wall. He stays there, not breathing, listening for angry pirates to come thundering in, looking for blood. Or dust, in his particular case.

Nothing happens. Everything is quiet.

After a couple minutes, his bones start to ache with the strain of trying to hold absolutely still. He risks inching sideways just a little, feeling along the wall for screws. He has no idea how he's going to unscrew a panel without a screwdriver and then climb inside without making a sound or electrocuting himself, but yet again, he'll figure something out. Probably.

It's warm in here. Anything is warmer than a stalled ship, to be fair, but it’s blessedly toasty over here, like curling up in front of a fire after a nap in a snowbank. He can feel the chill easing out of his bones as the seconds turn to minutes. The airlock should've unlocked by now. It's too much to hope they got stuck over there. What are they even doing?

Another question, which is becoming increasingly relevant as the exhausted shivers creep in: how long has it been since he took a stim? He thought it was only twenty minutes before they boarded him. He should've been good for a while, but he's already crashing. Maybe he got a bad dose. That’d be his luck.

He feels the wall as he creeps along at a snail’s pace and finds another panel without screws. Who builds a goddamn cargo hold without any access panels? Eventually he's going to run out of wall, and then he has no idea what he's going to--

The panel right behind his head falls away, and a bright light sears into his sockets. Sans jerks away and nearly upsets the box of cargo he's using as makeshift cover. He squints against the light, expecting to be staring down the barrel of a gun, and sees--

Another skeleton. They have a flashlight rigged to the side of their skull with a complicated arrangement of duct tape and zip ties. There's no weapon in their hand. They say, bemused, "Hi." Then it seems to occur to them that their flashlight is glaring in Sans's face, and they turn it off. "Sorry. Who're you?"

The glaring light is gone, but those dark spots still aren't really clearing. If anything, they're crowding together, blotting out the skeleton's increasingly worried face.

That stinging smack just before he went through the airlock...

It seems to take way too much effort, but he raises a hand and feels at his neck. His fingertips find a little cloth patch. It's way too late by now, but he pries it off, fighting the gluey layer of chemicals that both makes the patch stubbornly cling and delivers a fuckton of sedatives through punctures made by microscopic needles.

The patch finally hits the floor with a wet slap. He stares down at the mess, blinking like that'll actually clear his vision, and then tells the blurry skeleton, "S'rry."

Oops. Wrong language. He raises his head and sees that the skeleton has raised the wrench clutched in their hands, ready to use it as a makeshift weapon. They look pissed and scared all at once.

That makes sense. It's been a long time since they saw each other.

"S'okay, Paps," Sans says woozily, holding his hands up to show they're empty. "'M not gonna hurt you."

His brother calls without looking away from him, "Hey, I think you guys mighta lost something!"

It's not Papyrus, Sans realizes. His soul tries to lurch through the floor, dragging him down with it. The skeleton curses and tries to catch him on his way down, dropping their wrench in the process, but he slips right through their hands. Nice of them to try, though.

The floor is cold. He lays there, trying to make his eyelights focus as the sheltering boxes of cargo get dragged away with an unnecessarily vicious flare of blue magic. A tall drink of water in a helmet and head-to-toe black canvas Temmie armor who Sans assumes is the polite pirate immediately moves towards the skeleton, stepping around Sans’s downed body; Sans’s dented ego appreciates that they keep an attack leveled at him the whole while. They ask the skeleton, “Are you all right? Did they--"

"They just sorta slurred some stuff and fell over," says the skeleton. "Are _you_ okay?"

"Fine," the polite pirate says. Even through the modulator, it sounds almost gentle. There's some kind of relationship there. Family? Lovers?

A pair of boots move in front of Sans's face. Sans blinks fuzzily up at Stabby. He should brace for them to kick him while he's down, but he can't make his body work right. Dying is probably going to hurt.

But Stabby doesn't kick him. They just stare silently down at him through that blank, impassive mask like they’re trying to figure him out. Or just waiting for him to give them an excuse to kill him. Somehow they seem like the most dangerous person in the room, even unarmed and unmoving.

Speaking of knives, Sans probably won’t get another chance to ask. He squints up at Stabby and says, "Big knife, little pirate. Y’overcompensating f’r somethin’?"

Wrong language again. Most of the words slosh queasily together into something barely coherent. Stabby cocks their head, interested or amused or annoyed or _something_ , and if Sans could just see their face for a second…

"Red," the skeleton says from a thousand miles away. Stabby doesn't look up, but the angle of their helmet shifts just a little in traitorous reflex.

"Izzat your name?" Sans asks with a sudden burst of extremely drugged inspiration. "Red?"

That finally makes Stabby move, leaning down and reaching towards his face. Sluggishly, Sans tries to flinch away, but they don't hit him. They just press something sticky and cold against the side of his neck. The discarded sedative patch, which they must’ve picked up off the ground where it fell. Sans is so fucked up he can't even feel the needles sink in.

In Sans's language, Stabby tells him, “Shut the fuck up.”

Or maybe Sans is already dreaming.

***

Stretch won't get out of the goddamn medbay.

The medbay is big enough for what they need, but it ain't so big that three of them can just stand around and watch Alphys work. It's cramped quarters. Alphys gets twitchy. But does Stretch budge? Nope. Not an inch. 

The thing is that Stretch is scary smart, his mind always flitting from place to place, always looking for something new and shiny to keep him occupied so he doesn’t have to think about the things he doesn’t want to. He gets so _bored_. If they'd come back home with somebody drugged to the gills who Red immediately cuffed to a bed in the medbay, there'd have been no keeping him from nosing around, but Stretch was in the middle of that whole mess in the cargo hold. That means he's invested now. Red'll have to pry him out of here with a crowbar.

"So what'd they do, anyway?" Stretch asks, idly spinning the wrench around in his fingers.

"They broke onto the ship and got within stabbing range of you, if you recall," Edge says.

"After we broke onto their ship and got within stabbing range of them, you mean," Stretch says.

"And if our situations were reversed and I was drugged and confined to _their_ medbay, I'd consider it more than justified," Edge says. 

When Stretch accidentally fumbles the wrench he's fiddling with, Edge catches it before it hits the ground and hands it back to him. The touch lingers longer than it has to. Edge has his head in the game, mostly, but he keeps finding excuses to reassure himself that his honey is in one piece. He always does after a close call. He’d probably try to get touchy with Red too if Red wouldn’t bite him for it.

"Thanks, babe," Stretch says sheepishly. He sets the wrench aside. Red gives it thirty seconds before he gets distracted by talking, picks it back up and starts fidgeting with it again.

"We don't know what they would've done if Red hadn't managed to hit them with that sedative," Edge says.

"If they wanted to hurt someone, they could've," Stretch points out. "They were still on their feet when I moved the grate out of the way and startled the hell out of them. They could've totally stabbed me in the face if they really wanted to."

"I'm aware," Edge says tightly.

Stretch reaches out and gives Edge’s knee a comforting pat. "But they only talked at me, and I'm pretty sure they weren't threatening me. They just sounded kinda... sad? I think they thought I was somebody else."

"They'll have a chance to explain when they wake up," Edge says.

Stretch turns his head to look at Red and asks pointedly, "Will they?"

Red shrugs. No promises.

Leaning around Edge to get a better look at Red, Stretch demands, "Okay, what's your deal? You've said like three words since we got in here, and two of them were telling me to get out."

"Leave him be, love," Edge says.

"No, seriously," Stretch says. The most inconvenient day of Red's life was when Stretch decided Edge wasn't scared of Red so Stretch didn't have to be either. The worst part is that Stretch wasn’t wrong. "Are you pissed because they slipped past you? Because if so, that's not--"

"They're a judge," Red says.

That gets Edge's fucking attention. His head snaps around, and he proceeds to stare at Red like he's trying to bore a hole through Red's skull and poke around inside.

Puzzled, Stretch says, "Uh, okay? So are we."

Yeah. There's a reason that Red was saving that revelation in his back pocket until he had a chance to talk to Edge alone.

Tact isn't Red's first language, or even his fourth, but he gives it a shot for Stretch. "Sort of. You were next in line when the old judge kicked it."

And now Stretch is the only survivor of his colony. No need for a judge when there was no one to serve. When the old judge died and left Stretch alone, she took everything with her. Stretch was born and raised for a job he’ll never have. He’s a haunted house with no ghost.

Everything Red has ever heard through the grapevine says that Stretch's people had been all open hearts and second chances. A bunch of goddamn space hippies. Even if Stretch had been the judge, they wouldn't have made him into the weapon Red is. They didn't work like that.

Maybe if they had, they would all still be alive. They wouldn’t have let in a bunch of LV hunters who came preaching peace and cooperation. Red and Edge wouldn't have found Stretch in that still, silent colony covered in other people’s blood, curled up under a table waiting to die. Maybe Stretch wouldn't have screaming nightmares and LV to his name.

Of course, Stretch also wouldn't have met Edge. The universe is a real bitch like that.

Stretch's expression darkens, and he looks away. He picks up the wrench and starts fiddling with it again. "Oh, okay. It's the whole 'you'll never understand the brooding darkness of my tortured soul' thing again. Gotcha."

Red can't keep his eyes from flicking to Edge. He finds Edge watching him, his gaze steady as a rock. The scar that bisects his left socket is deep and jagged.

Even Stretch doesn't know that story. It was before his time. If Edge is waiting for Red to be the one to tell it to him, he'll just have to keep on waiting.

Fixing his eyes on the sleeping judge's face, Red changes the subject. "It's a little too fucking convenient that we found a judge who speaks Runian stalled in an empty ship right where we happened to be hunting. I don't trust it."

Red can almost hear Stretch scribbling a mental post-it note to go find a Runian dictionary online. The guy's got an eidetic memory; he can probably figure out what the judge said earlier by the phonetics, or at least he'll give it a damned good shot. Red'll ask him later. That'd be useful info to have.

Unless they were just making another smartass crack about Red's height, that is. Stretch would never let him live that down.

"So why's them speaking Runian a big deal?" Stretch asks. "I don't think I've ever even heard of it."

"Nobody really speaks it outside this one dinky little planet called Deltarune on the other end of the 'verse," Red says. With the toe of his boot, he prods the judge's bed. "If that's their first language, they're a long way from home."

"C-could you not," Alphys says irritably. The rapidfire tapping of her claw on the screen of her scanner doesn't pause. She's trying to decrypt the judge's check info, and the three of them talking isn't helping her concentrate. "I'm t-trying to work here. Quit b-being an asshole."

"Can't," Red says. "It's a condition."

Alphys snorts.

Ignoring them, Edge tells Stretch, like he talks about the bad old days all the time instead of only when he absolutely has to, "In the last days before Fell collapsed into total chaos, the king was convinced Deltarune was trying to destabilize the situation, kill him and take over. Of course, he was completely paranoid at that point. Deltarune is a backwater that doesn't dabble in universal politics, and he had made no end of other enemies even if someone else _was_ at fault for Fell's problems. But it's possible."

"Oh," Stretch says, some of the stiffness going out of his spine as he understands what Red's problem is.

Fell violently burned itself out four years ago, and its king had died with it. Edge made very sure of that. But Undyne, who's the closest thing the king had to an heir, is alive and on this ship. So is Edge, her second-in-command. So is Alphys, Fell's Royal Scientist. So is Red. If somebody still has a grudge, this ship is one hell of a target. 

(Red told them all it was safer to split up, but did anybody listen to him? Of course not.)

"So you wanna kill this person just because they're a judge," Stretch says. "You're telling me if I'd been a full-tilt judge when you found me--"

"Not all of us can be squeamish, honey," Red says.

That's crossing the asshole line, even for Red. He knows Stretch got his pacifist streak the hard way. But Red isn't in the fucking mood for this bullshit, even from him.

Stretch winces, just a little. But it passes quickly, and the grin he gives Red afterwards is bright and sharp and all kinds of pissed off. Like a dog with a bone, he says, "But you're gonna talk to them first, right? You wanna know what they know."

Red gives Edge a sidelong look. Edge crooks a brow and lets Red just swing in the wind. He's probably a little bent about that 'squeamish' crack.

"Right," Stretch says, like Red actually answered him. "So what're you gonna do if it turns out you're wrong?"

"Don't you got work to do?" Red asks.

"Well, I know I-I do," Alphys says pointedly. "I'm d-done with the exam. And I d-decrypted their check info. Um, well, mostly. B-but this is kinda need-to-know i-information, Stretch. Sorry."

"Yeah, and I don't need to know, I get it," Stretch says with a roll of his eyes. He seems satisfied, like he somehow won an argument he and Red weren’t even really having. He offers Red his closed fist. “See you later?”

The look in his eyes is a question: _are we cool?_ Like the two of them butting heads once in a while means Red’s gonna stay pissed at him forever. Stretch has got some abandonment issues, but fuck, it’s not like he didn’t come by them honestly. 

“When I’m done,” Red says mildly, tapping his fist against Stretch’s with a click of bone on bone. “Probably won’t be for a while. If you ain’t tucked up snoozing in your bed, maybe we can play some poker or something.”

“Yeah, or something,” Stretch says, grinning. He turns to give Edge a loud, obnoxious smooch on the cheek. "I'll see you later, baby."

Edge doesn't quite smile, but the slight curve of his mouth seems to be enough for Stretch. With a wave, Stretch finally fucks off, and Edge fondly watches him go. Then he glances at the judge on the bed, and all that warmth drains away.

Looks like Red isn't the only one who'd be okay with quietly shoving the judge out an airlock. They shouldn't have gone anywhere near Stretch. It's even odds whether Edge will let Red kill them, but he can be convinced. That's something.

"Doctor?" Edge asks. "You said their check data was partially decrypted. What did you find?"

"Their n-name is Sans," Alphys. "I g-got stats too, but I d-don't know if they're legit. They seem way t-too low. Like, ones across the b-board low."

"No other data?" Edge asks. "No description?"

"S-sorry," Alphys says, shrinking in on herself just a little. 

"Don't be," Edge says. "That's more than we had. What showed up on the medscan?"

"They've got a couple bruises, but that could've been from R-Red or from f-falling on their face," Alphys says, poking at her datapad. “Some magic d-deficits. Looks like they've been living on t-tight rations for a while and n-not sleeping enough."

That tracks. The magic between their bones has that pale, watery look Red remembers too well from Fell and from Stretch when they first found him. When Red talked to the baby AI on the judge's ship, they said Sans had been running non-stop since they left the main port in Unity four days ago, and fuck knows where they'd been before that.

(Doesn’t mean anything. Red wasn’t any less dangerous when he was half-starved.)

Alphys hesitates, gnawing on her lower lip, before finally spitting out, "They've b-been t-taking a lot of stims."

Always a sensitive subject with Alphys. Usually when she’s talking nerdy she can get through a couple sentences at a time without stuttering, but not tonight. 

"Um, they still have it i-in their system, which is w-why it took so long f-for the sedative to kick in," Alphys continues. She darts a nervous look at Red. "I g-got into their inventory, a-and they had a big stash i-in there."

"Where is it?" Red asks.

Alphys points at a colorful pile of blister-wrapped pills on the counter. Fuck. Red had been so distracted that she could've pocketed the whole thing without him even noticing. Stupid. First this asshole Sans slips past him, then Alphys gets access to a shit-ton of drugs. Red can’t afford to get this careless because he’s a little tired.

"That all of it?" Red asks, careful to sound neutral. Alphys nods jerkily. It's the truth. He gives her a crooked grin so she knows he believes her. "Thanks, Al. I'll take care of it."

He gets up, goes over and puts the whole thing in his own inventory as Alphys tries not to stare at it hungrily. Add that to the list of Sans's sins: bringing drugs onto Red's goddamn ship. 

"Hey," Alphys says suddenly, making him look at her. "They might n-need those, if they've b-been taking them f-for a long time. D-don't get rid of them y-yet."

Much as Red wants to snarl that he’s not this bastard’s fucking drug dealer, she has a point. He was there when Alphys went into withdrawal, more than a few times. He's not gonna get much information from Sans if they're puking all over the brig.

Although it might be a useful lever to apply, if he needs it.

(And if Sans doesn't need them, hey, the occasional stim comes in handy when Red's gotta keep the boss from noticing he's not sleeping again. Like right now, for instance.)

As Red slouches back to his chair, Edge asks Alphys, "Anything else?"

"N-not really?" Alphys says. "J-just the standard data. Their m-main traits are p-patience and justice. Their p-pulse is up. Their temperature is kinda low, b-but their ship was running on emergency p-power, so that makes sense." She perks up. "Oh! If you're gonna r-run identifying m-marks through the usual databases, they d-don't have any scars, but their soulmark is a little b-black star at the top of their l-left scapu--"

Alphys stops cold.

Figures. With all the times Alphys has patched Red up, she knows his body better than some of the people he's actually fucked. The only person who knows it even better is--

"Doctor," Edge says with ominous calm. "Could you give us a few moments alone, please?"

"Y-yeah," Alphys says. She's staring at Red, eyes wide, looking like she's torn between horror and starry-eyed awe. "Call me when you're, um, d-done."

She gets the hell out of the blast radius. If Red was smart, he'd be right behind her, but there’s nowhere to hide on the ship that Edge can't easily hunt him down. So he stays where he is and watches Sans's expression as they sleep. If he even thinks they’re awake and eavesdropping, he’s hitting them with another tranq.

Meanwhile Edge is giving him that patented silent stare that makes people squirm and blurt out what he wants to know just to make it stop. Too bad Red's immune. Hell, he's the one who taught Edge that trick to begin with.

"You knew," Edge says. 

It's not a question, but Red answers it anyway. In hands, just in case. "Saw it when I tried to pull them back by the jacket."

Their too-big shirt pulled down, showing off that familiar mark he recognized from the mirror. A small ink-black star, eight points, just like Red’s. Felt like somebody punched him in the goddamn sternum. That moment’s hesitation is the only reason they slipped through his fingers, and it could’ve ended with Stretch’s dust on the floor.

"And you declined to mention it," Edge says, switching to hands without missing a beat.

"Yep."

"I see." Edge leans forward on his chair, elbows on his knees, deliberately putting himself in Red's personal space. Red doesn’t give an inch of ground. Edge’s expression stays absolutely level as he signs, "And were you going to give me all the information I needed to hear, not as your brother but as your captain, before I decided to let you shove your soulmate out an airlock?"

Red’s grin widens until it aches a little. He tells Edge aloud in Fell, “I don’t need your fucking permission.”

The silence that follows prickles along the back of Red’s neck. He knows that expression; Edge just crossed the line into being well and truly pissed at him. Finally, Edge signs in one sharp motion, “Why?”

Red’s strained patience snaps like a rubber band. His signing is sloppy as fuck, too angry and too fast, but he doesn’t doubt for a second that Edge can understand him. “For fuck’s sake, think. It was already too convenient for a judge who just happens to be a skeleton to show up on our doorstep, but hey, turns out they're my soulmate too? Bullshit. They’re trying too hard."

"And if their soulmark is real?" 

With a scoff, Red signs, "Your honey crammed your skull too full of pretty notions."

"I'm not talking about sentiment," Edge signs. "Finding your soulmate is vanishingly rare even if you're actually looking for them, and I doubt there are studies on the consequences of one soulmate killing the other. We don't know what might happen to you if you kill them."

"So I'll let you be the one to push the button to cycle the airlock," Red signs. "Are we done here? I gotta get Alphys to clear him so I can put him in the brig."

Edge's brows rise. He signs, "Him? Do you know something I don’t?"

Red shakes his head, trying to clear the fatigue. "Slip of the tongue, that's all. My bad."

Watching Red through narrowed eyes, Edge gives a non-committal hum in a really judgemental way. It's almost impressive. When Red decides to take that as a yes and reaches for his comm, Edge signs abruptly, "You aren't the slightest bit curious?"

 _"Big knife, little pirate."_

For the first time since they crumpled to the floor of the cargo bay, Sans stirs. Before Red can reach for a weapon or a sedative, they curl up on their side, facing the wall. The mark peeks out from beneath the collar of their shirt, and Red has the stupidest fucking urge to reach out and touch it.

Red peels a fresh sedative patch and slaps it on Sans's spine, hiding the mark just peeking out from under their shirt. He signs, "Only thing I'm curious about is how they managed to fake a soulmark. That trick could come in handy."

Edge gives Sans a long, thoughtful look. "Yes," he signs. "I imagine we could learn a great deal from them."

“Don’t,” Red growls in Trade, turning to glare at him. 

Edge holds up his hands, a gesture of ceasefire, although there’s a glint in his eye that means he’s still pissed even if he doesn’t want to deal with it right now. Not in the medbay, where there are so many easily broken things and a drugged judge cuffed to a bed. It’ll be awhile before they have the time to spare for that. Red’s got too much shit to do. Maybe in a couple days, he’ll be able to clock off for longer than it takes to grab a ration bar and a catnap.

Until then, Edge has Stretch. It works out.

Speaking of. Red signs, “You can’t tell Stretch.” 

As stupid as Edge is being about this, Stretch would be a thousand times worse. He already wants to keep Sans as a pet. If he finds out about the soulmark, any chance of Red quietly dealing with the situation is gone. 

“Agreed,” Edge signs. “I think it would be wise to keep this between us, at the moment. But if he finds out on his own, I won’t lie to him.”

“He won’t find out,” Red signs, not looking at Sans. “They’re not gonna be here that long.”

***

As soon as Sans is settled in the brig, Undyne kicks Red out. Edge's orders, she tells him with malicious cheer. She's in charge of the prisoner until they wake up, which might be anywhere from a few hours to a dozen. Probably a dozen. Recovering from days of stims instead of sleep is a bitch even if you haven't been hit with a couple tranqs on top of it.

Fine. Whatever. It's not like Red doesn't have a shit-ton of other work to do. He has to run Sans's name and description through a few dozen databases to see what comes up. While he's at it, he oughta look up photos of Deltarune's judges to find out if any of them look familiar.

Pouring himself another cup of what could theoretically be called coffee, Red says, "Hey, G, connect me to the Federation's criminal database."

"No," Gaster says. 

Gaster is a misfit toy like the rest of them; they found him in the blasted remains of a ship that had been drifting through the void for a decade. No ship to manage, no crew to talk to, no data input, no connection to the net. He was awake the entire time, unable to communicate, unable to shut himself down, unable to do anything but wait for someone to find him. It’d be enough to send anybody around the bend. All that isolation has given him a weird sense of humor and the absolute conviction that the crew is a bunch of stupid baby ducklings he needs to keep from wandering off the side of a cliff, which is all fine and good when it’s not Red being herded. 

Red says, "I ain't in the mood right now. Don't fuck with me or I'm putting you in a motorized vacuum."

"As much as I would enjoy the novelty, I'm afraid you don't have the administrative privilege to do that right now," Gaster says. "You could binge-watch soap operas again, if you'd like."

Slowly, Red puts down his mug. He likes this mug, he stole it from the gift shop of that casino in Mosphei, and right now he's a little too tempted to throw it. "Lemme guess. Captain's orders."

"Oh no, it was Stretch," Gaster says. "But he's the chief engineer, so I defer to him in these matters. Besides, I like him better than you."

Red turns on his heel and starts towards the bunks. One of the crew that was heading into the galley sees Red's expression and flattens herself against the wall to get out of his way. Smart. He makes a mental note of it; it always pays to remember which crew has any goddamn common sense whatsoever, seeing as it’s in such short supply around here.

"I was the one who pried you out of that hunk of rust, asshole," Red says as he walks. At this point, people are used to only hearing half of his arguments with Gaster. "Where's your fucking gratitude?"

"Did you know you've gotten 19 hours and 43 minutes of sleep in the last twelve days?" Gaster asks. "The captain was very impressed when I told him. I believe that's a new record for this year."

"So you're a narc."

"He asked," Gaster says. “Also, may I point out that you've also revoked administrative access when you thought other crew were dangerously overworking themselves? Seeing as you have a large collection of knives and a tendency to get irritable when you’re sleep-deprived, I can understand his reasoning."

Like it’s weird for a guy to have a knife collection. Knives don’t need ammo, and they still work even if somebody gets a magic suppression cuff on him. Knives are _practical_. Red tells him, "Fuck you, sparky.”

"No thank you," Gaster says. “You’re entirely too full of fluids.”

“I only revoked Edge’s access one lousy time, when he caught that fucking flu.”

“And Stretch’s, when he caught it from Edge shortly thereafter,” Gaster says helpfully. “You didn’t give it back for a week, if I recall. They were both somewhat vexed.”

“S’different,” Red mutters. “Now fuck off until I comm you, all right?”

“Fucking off,” Gaster says cheerfully.

Red makes it to the bunks and heads for the one at the end of the hall. It's the biggest and has the best soundproofing. After Stretch and Edge started knocking boots, everybody on-board was happy to let them have it for the sake of communal harmony.

(Red has his own room. His own bed. He even uses it sometimes.)

The door is unlocked. One more reason to tear a strip off them both, not that Red needs it when he's got plenty to spare. He doesn't bother knocking. He just yanks the door open and storms inside. Not for the first time, he’s sorry that he can’t really slam a hatch behind him, but he gives it his best shot.

Edge is sitting with his back against the headboard, his jacket and boots off. Stretch is on his lap, all long and sleek and very, very naked. They both turn to look at him like he's a deer that just wandered up to a pair of wolves and bragged about how juicy their neck is.

"Fuck you both," Red says, trying to hold onto the righteous fury he walked in here with.

Stretch grins at him. "That's the idea, yeah."

The small, closed room smells like sex, sweet as honey. Stretch shifts, turning towards him, letting Red see his hectic blush and the slick magic on the inside of Stretch's femurs. They got each other plenty warmed up, but Edge's pants are still on. 

They waited for him. 

Red knows they both see him waver. His magic stirs despite the long, shitty night he's had. Anger keeps him sharp, and with an unknown judge on-board, sharp is how he needs to stay, but he can feel it slipping through his fingers like water.

"I want my fucking administrative access back," Red says.

"Oh, whoops," Stretch says innocently. "Must’ve been a mistake. Gimme one sec.”

Stretch reaches over to the nightstand to grab a datapad, grinding a little on Edge’s lap by total lack of coincidence. Edge’s eyelights flare, his fingers flexing where he’s gripping Stretch’s hip. That predatory stare rests on Red. There’s something possessive and tender in it that makes Red’s soul ache like a bruise. 

(He can feel the first drops of slick welling up from the surface. Edge didn’t even have to do anything but look at him to get him wet.)

After tapping a few buttons, Stretch puts the datapad back down and leans indolently against Edge. Fuck Stretch for making Red think words like _indolently_. “Fixed it. You can go work now if you want.”

Like Red has the strength to walk away from this.

Red narrows his eyes at Edge over Stretch’s shoulder. Edge just looks at him through half-lidded eyes, pleased with himself. He knows damned well they’ve got Red right where they want him.

Stretch touches Edge's hand where it's resting possessively on his hip, guiding it between his spread femurs. His breath hitches when Edge touches him, long fingers slipping between the folds of his cunt. Like the shameless brat he is, Stretch sighs, "’Course, you could always stay."

"You're laying it on a little thick, honey," Red says, his voice slightly hoarse.

Stretch grins. "That's what she said."

Despite himself, Red snorts. 

Edge holds out a hand, offering his now-slick fingers for Red to taste. (More than a taste. Red can have as much of the two of them as he wants.) Even outside of this bedroom, Red doesn’t really answer to Edge as his captain. Captain is a title for other people, that’s all, something to needle Edge with when he takes himself too seriously. Red answers to him because of the collar around his throat, the scar over Edge’s socket, the dark places Edge has dragged Red back from no matter how hard Red fought to stay there. 

When Red hesitates, Edge says quietly, "Come here, brother."

That’s all it takes. Red locks the door. The click of metal is as loud as a gunshot. The familiar sound makes his pulse slow. His tension starts to drop away for the first time since he saw Sans’s face, and he realizes that his bones ache from holding that tension for hours. He feels the full weight of how fucking tired he is.

When Red goes to them, Stretch pulls him into their bed like he belongs there. As Edge hooks his fingers in the collar and drags Red close to claim a kiss, Red tells himself he'll go back to work after they’re done. He won’t let them convince him to stay.

He knows he's lying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: This is space pirates doing space piracy, so everyone is kind of an asshole. There's food insecurity, drug use, both Underswap and Underfell getting destroyed in the backstory, Red holding Sans at knifepoint and then using a sedative on him, mention of vomiting, the long-term psychological effects of isolation, fellbros codependent bullshit, a medical examination, imprisonment, and Red being a dick to pretty much everyone even if he basically means well. Let me know if there's anything else you think I need to warn for? I've been staring at this for so long that I might be missing something.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

It probably says something unfortunate about Sans's life that when he wakes up in a cell with magic suppressor cuffs around his wrists, his first thought is simply: _not this shit again._

Suppressor cuffs always give him wicked vertigo, and he’s pretty sure he doesn't have magic to spare for puking all over himself. It's better if they don't know he's awake until he's got his equilibrium back, so he keeps his eyes closed and just takes stock. 

The cell is warm and quiet. He's laying on something relatively soft. The cuffs aren't padded, but they did cuff him with his wrists in front of him instead of behind his back, which is unexpectedly nice of them. He has a bitch of a headache from the stim-and-tranq cocktail hangover. The quiet is thick and muffled like Snowdin after a heavy snowfall, which means the cell is unfortunately soundproofed, but he thinks (hopes) he hears the hum of an engine. He's still on the ship. He still has time to figure something out.

Yeah. Because the last time he tried to improvise, it turned out so well.

The dizziness has eased up a little. He risks cracking an eye open. The light is mercifully dim, what with the pounding headache. He doubts they were thinking of his comfort, but hey, he’ll take whatever upsides he can get. Always look on the bright side of prolonged captivity.

So. The walls aren't padded. All the edges of the room haven't been rounded off for safety. It's not a seamless white box where the lights never turn off. There's a reassuring lack of blood on the walls. It's probably small and barebones by normal people standards, but pretty generous by his. He’s lying on a cot affixed to the wall. There’s a little notch that he thinks might open into a toilet for those prisoners who actually need one, and--

There's a soft click and then someone (a woman?) says gruffly over some kind of comm system, "You gonna puke?"

Sans swallows against his cottonmouth and says, “No.”

Something clunks right beside the bed, and a little tray slides out of the wall. Whoever designed it, they did a damned good job; he didn't even see a seam. 

On the tray, there’s a flimsy paper cup of a pale, steaming liquid that smells like food. It's been a long time since he ate that isn’t a ration bar. A sharp stab of hunger makes his soul clench tight as a fist, but he doesn't reach for it. He's played this particular game before.

( _”No! The judge does not hunger. The judge does not want. The judge is pure!”_ )

"Well?" The voice barks, loud enough that the comm squeals a protest. "Are you gonna eat it or not, punk? I haven't got all fucking day!"

That's either permission or the kind of mind game where they'll only be satisfied if he loses. Either way, he takes the cup. (Drinking with his hands cuffed is an art that takes some practice, but he's pretty okay at it by now.) The food might be dangerous, but he'd been unconscious for a while. If they really wanted him dead, he would've just never woken up. Easy.

Well, unless they wanted to watch him suffer a slow death by poisoning. But at this point, they can poison the hell out of him so long as he gets some soup out of it, so fuck it. 

He takes a sip. It's salty and hot with mysterious green leaves and squishy little white cubes floating through it. The magic floods into him like taking a shot, a sudden rush of life to the head. Involuntarily, he takes a deep, shaky breath. Stupid. There's no reason to get all fucking dramatic about it.

He nurses the cup slowly, eyes closed, savoring the little bit of it there is. The person on the comm doesn't yell at him again to hurry up. Maybe they got bored and wandered off so he can escape. That'd be nice. Not likely, though.

By the time he finishes the soup, his marrow feels like it's buzzing with energy and warmth. Better than a stim. He returns the cup to the tray, which promptly slides back into the wall. Somebody is still standing there after all. Or there's an AI watching him. A ship of this size would basically have to have one.

"Thanks," he says. Never hurts to be polite to an AI. Or the warden, for that matter. He doesn't think it was Stabby, but it's not like they have a long acquaintance. Just an exciting one, what with the drugs and knives and fire alarms.

There's no answer. The lights don’t come on. As the seconds creep into several minutes of absolute silence, aside from the distant hum of the engine, slow dread starts to crawl up Sans's spine. He rolls his shoulders to shake it off. It’s fine. He made it two years. He's not gonna lose it now just because they locked him up and didn’t talk to him for a while.

He looks up at the ceiling. Technically the AI is the ship and therefore everywhere, but he always looks up because that seems less crazy than talking to the walls. "Hey, I know you're prob'ly not supposed to talk to me, but you wanna hear a joke?"

The comm clicks back on. The warden says, "What the fuck? No, I don't wanna hear a fucking joke--"

"Great, but I was talking to the AI," Sans says. "Anybody tell you it's kinda rude to butt into somebody else's conversation?"

The warden makes a strangled, inarticulate noise, and the comm clicks off. The AI doesn't say anything.

"I'm gonna take that as a yes.” Sans stretches out on the shitty little cot, making himself comfortable. "Really sweet of you to let me practice my standup routine. I’ve gotten rusty. Anyway, a skeleton and an elemental walk into a bar…"

***

“Hey, Red?” Stretch says. His voice is as gentle as the hand he’s got resting on Red’s shoulder, his thumb stroking back and forth over bare bone. “Your dude’s awake.”

“‘S not my dude,” Red mumbles into his pillow. Okay, it's Edge’s pillow, but too bad, bitch, possession is nine-tenth of the fucking law. Then the actual content of what Stretch says pierces through the comfortable haze of sleep, and he sits up sharply enough to make a couple of his vertebrae pop. “Wait, what?”

“Your prisoner,” Stretch says patiently. He’s got a cup of coffee in his hands, a datapad in his lap, and not a stitch of clothes on. He looks damned perky for somebody who got thoroughly railed last night. Way more perky than Red feels. “He’s awake. You want some coffee?”

There’s no sign of Edge. He slipped out of bed without Red noticing, which says something about how hard Red crashed when they were done with him. He steals Stretch’s coffee, ignoring his indignant squawk. Once he’s finished it off, he’s awake enough to ask, “What time is it?”

“Around 0400,” Stretch says. “Y’know, you can’t steal my coffee willy-nilly just ‘cause you nilly my willy.”

“04--” Red shoves the empty mug back at Stretch and starts climbing out of bed. His body aches pleasantly in some places, like his pelvis, and not so pleasantly in others, like pretty much everywhere else. “What the fuck happened to waking me up in two hours?”

“I honestly don’t know what you expected,” Stretch says. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”

Good point. Red gives him the finger anyway. “Where’s my fucking Temmie armor?”

“I dunno, dude, it’s your armor,” Stretch says, like he’s not the one who peeled Red out of it last night. “Just wear that jacket with the kevlar.”

“No, it’s gotta be the Temmie armor. Covers up more. Helmet too, I don’t wanna give them anything to work w--” Something Stretch said finally catches up with him. Red stops in the middle of poking through a tangle of black fabric on the floor that turns out to be Stretch’s sweatpants, raising his head to stare at Stretch. “Did you say he?”

“I did,” Stretch says, looking smug as hell. He holds out his datapad. “You said Deltarune was dinky, so I figured, hey, how many skeletons named Sans could be from there? Only the one, it turns out! It’s not a lot of data yet, just what I found in a couple hours.”

It didn’t even occur to Red to try that first. Goddamn, he _had_ been tired last night. He takes the datapad and reads through it. It doesn’t take long. Looks like a collection of basic bureaucratic paperwork: a passport, the deed to a house in a town called Snowdin, a citation for running an illegal hot dog stand. A missing person report. It's a hell of a lot more information than Red had.

When he glances up, he finds Stretch watching him with bright, hopeful eyes. Edge would be able to tell he'd done good without Red saying a word, but Stretch can be kind of sensitive about this shit. Grudgingly, Red says, “Ain't half bad, honeybun.”

Stretch preens, like Red knew he would. A little praise and he lights up. “Thanks. And before you get your panties in a twist, I already ran Sans’s name and description through the databases you usually do. He’s got no criminal record aside from a weiner citation.”

“Yeah, well.” Red tucks the datapad into his inventory and goes back to trying to find his armor. “That don’t necessarily mean anything. I ain’t in those databases either. None of us are. It’s not that hard to wipe your record if you know what you’re doing.”

“If you say so,” Stretch says. He shoves his empty mug into the coffee dispenser on his bedside table. Red would bitch about the fact that _he_ doesn’t get a bedside table even though Stretch is the one who sleeps in the middle, but a) Red has his own room, he doesn’t actually live here, and b) there’s a lot of his stuff scattered all over Stretch’s table anyway. As the mug fills, Stretch peers down at his bare feet. “Oh, hey, looks like your armor got kicked under the bed over here.”

When Stretch helpfully tosses it his way, Red catches the heavy canvas-and-kevlar bundle out of mid-air and starts to put it on. Then it occurs to him that there’s still orange and red magic smeared generously over his pelvis and femurs, and a fair amount of silver slick on the inside of his ribs and down his spine. He picks up one of Edge’s shirts out of the hamper and wipes off the worst of the mess.

“He’s gonna kill you,” Stretch says, sounding not particularly fussed about it.

“It’s his jizz,” Red says. “S’only fair.”

“I also contributed jizz,” Stretch says, offended. “Don’t discount my jizz contributions.”

“Hard not to notice your contributions when you came all over my dick, honey,” Red says. “So where is the boss, anyway?”

“Brig,” Stretch says. “He figured you’d feel better if it was him and Undyne both standing guard until you got there.”

Right. Red knows his brother. Edge is tough as nails, sure, and he’s done no end of fucked up shit to stay alive like the rest of them, but deep down, he’s also the guy who saw a kitten with a busted leg in a shipyard and decided to bring her home. “To take care of vermin in the cargo hold,” he said, but they only get a couple mice on board a year and they all know it. Doomfanger lives on food from the replicator like a spoiled little queen and sleeps on whatever bed or bunk or hammock she chooses. Edge has a soft spot for strays and sob stories.

(Okay, so maybe Red didn’t fight too hard when Edge found a bloody, nearly catatonic Stretch under a table and refused to leave without him. So what. There’s a big difference between a broken almost-judge who’d lost everything and a full-blown judge who’s a goddamn honey trap in slippers and a fake soulmark.)

Edge should know better than to get ideas about running a halfway home for stray judges. Not every colony or planet uses their judge as a weapon, sure, but enough of them do to ensure that collecting judges would come with a real short life expectancy. Red has the scars to prove it.

Hell, _Edge_ has the scar to prove it. Red put it there himself. 

Red starts putting his armor on faster. For all that Edge asked if Red was curious about Sans, it’s hard to imagine Edge isn’t pretty curious himself, what with the possible soulmate thing. Fuck knows Red would be plenty interested if somebody turned up with Edge’s soulmark, or Stretch’s, or even Undyne or Alphys’s. (Interested and suspicious as fuck.) With Edge, it’s not hard for him to go from being curious to dangerously attached.

When Red is dressed, gloves and boots and all, Stretch says, “C’mere for a second.”

“Seriously, I don’t got time,” Red says, but he goes anyway. “What?”

“You forgot something.” Stretch helpfully does the last two closures at the throat that Red somehow missed in his rush, then leans forward and kisses him. All right, so Red does have a second to spare for that. “I’ll keep digging in Deltarune’s system. Don’t toss him out the airlock yet, yeah?”

“Depends on if he tries anything stupid,” Red says. 

“That’s all I ask,” Stretch says, like that’s not the most hilarious fucking thing Red’s ever heard. There’s no end of things that Stretch asks. _Sleep here tonight. Take a few days off to come on-planet with me. Help me smoke this weed. Try to shoot people in the kneecaps instead of the head._ Blah blah blah. He’s lucky Edge is so gone on him. Although him handing Red the fresh mug of coffee he just made doesn’t hurt. "Have fun being an asshole for no reason."

"I always do," Red says, raising the mug in a salute. He takes a shortcut and pops back into existence at the entrance to the brig to find Edge and Undyne watching a security feed, shoulder to shoulder.

"-- thought he was gonna cry when I gave him that miso," Undyne is saying, looking uncomfortable. Her arms are crossed over her chest, guns on full display. “I know Red’s got a real bug up his ass about this ‘cause of the whole judge thing, and believe me, I’m not freaking thrilled about the security risk either, but--”

Deliberately, Edge turns his head to look at Red in the doorway. He gives Red a long, assessing look before nodding and turning back to the monitor. "Come here and look at this."

"Good fucking morning to you too," Red says. 

He goes over to join them over at the monitors, shouldering Undyne aside so he can see the screen. She snarls and shoves at the side of his head without any real force. She could spike his skull like a volleyball if she really wanted.

"Don't make me separate you," Edge says mildly.

"Like to see you try, boss," Red says. He gets a good look at the monitors, where Sans is stretched out on the cot. His eyes are closed, his expression relaxed like he's in a hammock on the beach instead of a goddamn brig. His mouth moves as he talks, but there’s no audio feed. Red narrows his eyes. "What the fuck is he doing?"

"Telling shitty jokes," Undyne says. "He's been going for like an hour and a half."

Which means he's been awake at least that long and nobody fucking told Red until now. Flatly, he says, "Izzat so."

Edge continues to serenely sip his mug of hot tea, ignoring Red's attempts to glare him to death.

"Technically he's telling _me_ shitty jokes," Gaster chimes in. “He even asked if I minded, which is more considerate than you or Stretch have ever been.”

“Tell me you didn’t talk to him,” Red groans. 

“Of course I didn’t. That’d be a breach of security,” Gaster says. “That hasn’t stopped him from talking to me.”

“Great.” Red rubs his brow. “Just great. Thanks for stepping in, fishbitch.”

“What was I supposed to do, tase him for having a shitty sense of humor?” Undyne demands. “‘Cause you’d be next in line, asshole!”

“You could try doing your fucking job, for starters,” Red says.

“Fuck you,” she says, wheeling around to glower at him. “You paranoid little--”

Her comm chirps. He can tell it’s Alphys on the other line because if it was anybody else, Undyne would just keep yelling that he’s being an idiot. Wouldn’t be the first time. Seeing as they’re both in charge of keeping the ship and the people in it safe, including each other, they take turns being the one doing the yelling and the one being yelled at.

But it’s Alphys calling, so Undyne steps back a step, taps her comm and says in a much warmer voice, “Hey, baby. You need something?” A pause. “Oh, uh…” 

Despite the fact that they’re supposedly co-captains, Undyne glances at Edge, who makes a shooing gesture towards the door. Her grin is as fierce and toothy as a skeleton’s. She pauses to punch Red in the arm just hard enough that it hurts like a bitch but the Temmie armor still absorbs the full impact so he doesn’t take any damage.

“That all you got?” Red asks. “You’re losing your touch.”

She sneers at him in a vaguely affectionate way. Then she’s out the door, her voice trailing behind her. “Sorry, Red was being a dumbass so I punched him a little. Anyway, I was just thinking about getting breakfast! You want me to cook for you? I could murder some eggs!”

When she’s gone, Red hisses out a breath through his teeth and rubs his aching arm. “Ow, fuck. She hits like a train.”

“Having never been hit by a train, I wouldn’t know,” Edge says. He checks Red because he’s obnoxious like that. “You’re fine.”

“I _know_ I’m fine,” Red says irritably.

“In fact, your HP is higher than it’s been in weeks,” Edge says. “You may not know this, brother, but here’s an interesting fact: sleeping once in a while can raise your base HP.”

“Nobody likes a smartass,” Red says.

“And yet I sleep with you,” Edge says. His gaze drops to Red’s throat, where he left a particularly dark bruise in the shape of his teeth. Like the collar, it’s hidden under the high neck of the Temmie armor, but Red feels the weight of that stare like Edge is gently pressing his thumb against the mark until it aches. He tries not to give Edge the satisfaction of watching him shiver, but judging by the slight curve of Edge’s mouth, he doesn’t succeed. Edge continues, “I assume you read the information Stretch found?”

“Yeah,” Red says. “I had plenty of time, apparently. Why the fuck didn’t you wake me up?” 

“If he’s as dangerous as you suspect, then you can’t afford to be so exhausted you make stupid mistakes,” Edge says. “How many times have you managed to get more information from an interrogator than they got from you?”

That’s a good point and they both know it. Red doesn’t answer, just drains the last sweet dregs of his coffee and watches the monitor. After a good thirty seconds of silence, he asks, “Did you read it?”

“Of course,” Edge says. “Unfortunately, it seems to raise more questions than it answers.”

“S’okay,” Red says. He puts the empty mug back in his inventory (it’s one of Stretch’s favorites and Red would catch no end of crap if he lost it) and pulls out his helmet. “Getting answers is my job.”

***

The door to the cell opens.

Sans isn’t prepared for it. He’s half-asleep, lulled by actual food, dim lights, and lingering exhaustion. Yet again, he doesn’t see a seam in the far wall until it slides partially open to let Stabby step inside. The ship engineer really knows their shit. Before Sans can even think _I could try to make a break for it_ , the door has already closed.

Probably for the best. The engine is still purring at the same constant tempo, which means they’re in the middle of deep space with nowhere to run. The safest place for him to be right now is in this cell.

Relatively speaking, anyway. From what little Sans can tell through Stabby’s armor and reflective helmet, they’re still cranky. It’s in their body language, the tension in their shoulders, the way their gloved hands aren’t quite curled into fists (yet) but aren’t open and relaxed either. If he tries something stupid again, they’re braced to put him down. They’d probably enjoy it.

(It’s only been a couple hours since the warden yelled at him. Sans shouldn’t be this grateful for somebody, _anybody_ , to talk to. But he is.)

“... because it was soda pressing,” Sans says, finishing the joke he was halfway through when the door opened. Real shame it was interrupted. It’s one of his favorites. Always made Papyrus groan like he was dying. Through the tar-thick and hazy memory of last night, a name comes back to him, and he grins. “Hey, Red. How’s tricks? I’d shake your hand, but, well.” He jingles the cuffs. “Y’know.”

Even through the raspy voice modulator, he can hear just how sardonically Red says, “Hi, Sans.”

Fuck. They must’ve hacked his check blocker while he was out. After a couple years on Unity, he doesn’t even know what the check description reads anymore. It’s probably nothing he wants them to know.

“Nice to be on a first name basis,” Sans says. Something else occurs to him, and he starts to sit up. Red bristles, their tension ready to snap, and Sans thinks better of it. He lays back down, showing his empty hands. “Sorry. Listen, did you get the AI off my ship?”

Even through the helmet, he can feel Red staring at him. They repeat, “The AI.”

“Yeah,” Sans says. “I’m assuming you left the ship back there. You got too much cargo in your cargo bay to fit it, and your engine isn’t running like you’re towing it. So did you take them with you?”

“You’re in a fucking brig and you’re worried about the AI,” Red says.

Sans shrugs. “Not their fault they’re on a hijacked ship with a lousy engine. They’re just doing their job, man.”

The angle of Red’s helmet shifts like they just looked at the ceiling, or maybe at the surveillance cameras undoubtedly embedded in the ceiling. Then they back up a couple steps and lean against the wall, their arms folded. Apparently they’ve decided to downgrade Sans from a threat level red (ha) to maybe an orangey-yellow.

“Forget the AI,” Red says. “What’s a judge from Deltarune doing all the way out here?”

They may as well have grabbed Sans’s soul and squeezed. It takes every ounce of control he has to keep his poker face on and continue lounging on the cot like he doesn’t give a shit. 

“Sorry,” Sans says. “You’ve got the wrong person. Deltarune’s judge is a guy named Gerson. Met him once or twice. He’s a real nice dude. He’s had the job for twenty-some years now.” 

“So I hear,” Red says. “Makes it a lot easier for the real judge to do his job, don’t it?”

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” Sans lies. “I’m sorry about the fire alarm thing, okay? And for coming on your ship. I get why you’d be cranky.”

“Do you now?” Red says.

“Yeah,” Sans says. “It must be annoying to have somebody show up on your ship without permission. Imagine if I’d brought weapons with me and tried to steal all your stuff. Man, what a dick move that would be.”

Unfortunately, Red ignores the bait. Or maybe fortunately, because Sans wouldn't survive Red beating the shit out of him for that comment. “What’s on CS-19?”

Okay, so they at least talked to the AI long enough to get his destination. Sans offers another shrug. He’s going through them like hotcakes. There’s gonna be a shrug shortage when this conversation is over. “Like I told you, my brother’s got a garage.”

“Oh, right,” Red says. “What was your brother’s name again? Papyrus, wasn’t it?”

Sans’s grin slips. Just for a second.

He knows Papyrus is still alive and relatively okay. That was the first thing he asked the AI to check when they were off Unity, and then he promptly wiped the request from the AI’s memory banks. Papyrus managed to avoid most of this whole clusterfuck, and Sans isn’t gonna drag him into it now. He found out where Papyrus is and headed in the opposite direction, as far as he can get.

It’s not hard to find out that Sans has a brother, not if they went looking in Deltarune’s record system. They shared the house in Snowdin. Papyrus’s name is on the deed, same as his. Red knowing Papyrus’s name doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to find him. They may just be using Papyrus as a carrot and a stick. Give them what they want and he might see his brother alive, etc.

Sans could get over the stolen ship, the sedatives, even locking him up in a brig. But Red brought Papyrus into it. Thinking _fuck you_ as loudly as he can in the privacy of his own skull is the only way he can keep his lazy grin intact. 

“Heh,” Sans says. “Okay. You got me. The garage thing is bullshit. I just decided to go out for smokes in the middle of the night and took the really scenic route.”

“Cute,” Red says. “I’m gonna ask one more time. What’s a judge who’s been missing for two years doing on a stolen ship with nothing but the clothes on his back?”

“You didn’t ask that the first time,” Sans says. “And I told you, I’m not the--”

“That’s not what your check says,” Red says. “Try again.”

He can’t see their face. He can’t hear their voice. All he has is their closed-off body language, which barely gives him anything. But the judge whispers: _liar_. 

Interesting. They’ve got an uneasy relationship these days, him and the judge, but it’s never outright lied to him. 

So. Unity probably put out a bounty by now. Maybe Red found out he’s a judge that way, although if they know that much, Sans doesn’t know why they’d still be asking questions. They should know as much as they’d need to in order to get paid. Unless they’re seeing if they can get a higher price for him elsewhere, in which case they’re gonna be real disappointed.

Alternate theory: maybe Red or one of the other pirates managed to hack deep enough into Deltarune’s records to find the truth, if Asgore has gotten so sloppy in the last couple years that he’d actually put that shit on the net where it could be found. That’s not out of the question. Sans isn’t particularly inclined to be charitable towards Asgore these days.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely. 

“Interesting question,” Sans says slowly. “I guess that depends. How ‘bout you tell me why a judge is hijacking ships?”

It’s a knife thrown in the dark, but it hits its target. Red tenses, their fingers twitching like they just stopped themselves shy of pulling a weapon. Then they relax, a deliberate slouch that makes them look even more dangerous. Sans can almost hear the smile in their voice when they say, “‘Cause it’s good money, that’s why. Can you blame me?”

“Kinda, yeah,” Sans says.

Red shrugs, thoroughly unapologetic. “You don’t got much high ground, seeing as you stole a ship.”

“With no one on it except the AI,” Sans says.

“Details, details,” Red says. “So now that I’ve answered your question, it’s your turn. How’d you fake the soulmark?”

With that non-sequitur, the conversation takes a hard swerve into bizarre territory. Sans blinks, thrown off his guard. “Uh, what now?”

“The soulmark,” Red says. “The one on your shoulder. Black star, eight points. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah, it does, seeing as it’s been there thirty years now,” Sans says warily. “I got born with it just like any other monster.” 

Red sighs into the voice modulator, a crisp burst of static. “Here I thought you were all about establishing the rapport, and now you’re lying to me again.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, dude.” When Red doesn’t say anything, Sans tries again. “C’mon. You’re a judge. Do I look like I’m lying to you?”

“Hard to say,” Red says, their tone maddeningly neutral. “You’ve been lying your ass off since I walked in here. Don’t got much basis of comparison for you telling the truth.”

What a dick. Sans wonders if he can ask for the polite pirate to handle the rest of this interrogation. Probably not. He says, “Even if I had a fake soulmark, why’s it matter?”

Red is silent for a while. Close to a minute. Sans can feel them staring at him, considering him, _judging_ him. His judge returns the favor. It’s a little like two stray cats warily circling each other, trying to decide which of them would win a fight and whether it’s worth the cost of finding out. His spine prickles.

No. His shoulder prickles. He’s too aware of his soulmark. It’s weird, like being suddenly reminded of the existence of his patella. The little black star has always just been there, thoroughly unremarkable. He’s not one of those people who spends hours poring over the pictures of marks posted on forums and sites for hopeless romantics, searching for a soulmate he’ll never find and never particularly miss. He didn’t figure anybody else would ever find his mark that interesting.

“Somebody else on this ship has that same mark,” Red says. “Now there’s a wild coincidence, huh?”

And now the swerve has turned into a 360 tailspin nightmare clusterfuck. Sans stares at them, but he can’t read anything but that same wary tension in their body language. The judge is silent. Of course it isn’t giving him any hints when he actually needs it. 

It’s fine. He knows what to do, because it’s about the only thing he can do even if it makes things worse. He laughs. “Sure, buddy. I just bet they do.”

“You think I’m bullshitting you?” Red asks.

The note of indignation in Red’s voice is even funnier. Yeah, laughing at them is probably a bad idea, but it’s been a long fucking day. Week. Two years. As far as manipulation goes, this is so refreshingly amateur it’s almost charming. Sans says, “I mean, I’ll give you credit for interrogating me first so I think you’re as surprised about this as I am. That was pretty good. But finding my soulmate is a little too far-fetched to make for a good con, y’know?”

“Oh, believe me, I know,” Red says flatly. 

“Might as well offer to make me the high-king emperor of the universe,” Sans says. “Or to let me out of your brig. Crazy, I know, but it might just work. Or hey, since I’m giving you constructive criticism from one judge to another, if you want me to believe a word you’re saying, you could take off your helmet so I can see your fucking face.”

Whoops. That sounded less than cool, calm and collected. It never pays to let them know they’ve gotten to him, whoever ‘they’ might be in this particular instance. So he forces himself to relax and puts his grin safely back in place.

“Or something like that, anyway,” Sans continues. “What do I know? You’re the one with the keys to the cuffs.”

Red doesn’t say anything. They don’t move. They just watch, their head slightly cocked, like a crow who found something shiny. Or dead. Or a much bigger bird to harass. Crows aren’t real picky about their entertainment, come to think of it.

Fuck it. Sans gives them another good verbal poke. “Pretty sure I was minding my own business when you decided to hijack my ship. Didn’t even put a sign on the side of it that said ‘dear pirates but especially Red, please steal all this cargo that I don’t have.’ Must’ve forgotten about the part where I lured you with my, uh…” Sans looks down at himself, still in the oversized t-shirt and shorts that are creased, sweaty, and stained with engine grease, and then back at Red. “... wiles.”

More silence. It’s starting to get unnerving. But fine, Sans can play that game. If he can talk to AIs who aren’t allowed to answer, then he can talk to someone who can answer but won’t. He says, “So I hate to interrupt your silent looming, but you wanna hear a joke? I got a million of ‘em. Seems like you could use a laugh.”

Quietly, Red asks, “What’re you running from?”

A chill runs up Sans’s back. He grins wider and says with complete honesty, “Nothing.”

An empty, silent room. Blank white walls. Lights that never turn off. Just enough sleep and rations to keep him functioning. ‘The judge is pure,’ they said, but Sans isn’t. He doesn’t want to be. If they drag him back to that compound, he’ll be--

Well, before long he’ll be nothing. There’ll only be the judge.

Red looks back at the corner of the ceiling where the cameras must be. There’s no signal as far as Sans can tell, but the door starts to open, slowly. Red watches him like a hawk for any movement as they back towards it.

Not stirring from his artfully languid sprawl, Sans says, “Oh, are we already done? Time flies. Bye, Red. Try not to kidnap anybody else, huh? Things might get a little crowded in here.”

There’s no answer. Never taking their eyes off Sans, Red slips through the door. It closes behind them. Sans is alone in a locked cell again. He can’t decide if it’s an improvement over having to deal with Red. Probably.

Soulmates. They seriously thought that was gonna work. Hilarious.

Sans rolls over onto his side, back to the door, facing the notch in the wall where the food tray came out. Maybe they’ll give him more of that soup. Probably not, given how unhappy Red was with his answers. Might not get anything to eat for a while. That’d suck. 

But hey, at least these assholes turn the lights off sometimes. At least there are notches in the wall and/or ceiling panels to count if he runs out of jokes. Things are looking up, really. 

His hands are starting to tremble. Too many stims in the last couple days. He knew he was going to have to deal with the comedown eventually. He just hoped it’d be a beach somewhere. A nice hotel room. The corner of a particularly quiet alley. He’s not picky, so long as it doesn’t involve a tiny room he can’t leave.

Well, can’t is a strong word. He recognizes this brand of cuffs now. He could get out of them in his sleep. Good thing Papyrus went through that escape artist phase when he was 14.

And thanks to Red, now Sans knows where the door and the surveillance cameras are. He can probably figure out how to get off this ship when they finally dock, if he takes a little time to think.

And right now he’s got nothing but time.

***

When Red gets out of the cell, Edge is waiting for him right by the door. If Sans was so inclined, he could have taken out both of them and made a break for it.

Red should tear into him for taking such a stupid security risk for no reason. He doesn't. He pulls the helmet off and just uselessly holds it in his hands as he and Edge stare at each other in silence. Nothing has to be said. Edge probably realized the truth as soon as Red did. Sooner, maybe, because Edge wasn’t trying his damnedest to ignore the evidence right in front of his face.

The soulmark isn't fake.

Whatever Edge is gonna say, Red doesn't want to hear it. He shoves his helmet into Edge's chest, keeping him at arm's length. "Get him some more miso. Alphys said he oughta be eating every couple hours. And he prob'ly needs a stim.”

“I’ll have it taken care of,” Edge says, watching him like he knows how close Red is to snapping. Which he probably does. He’s got enough experience by now. “What are you going to do?”

“I gotta go figure out if whatever he’s running from is still chasing him,” Red says. His itinerary for the morning isn’t what Edge is asking about, not really, but it’s the only answer he’s got. “If so, he’s on our ship, which makes it _our_ fucking problem.”

“He’d probably provide more helpful information if you let him out of the cell,” Edge says. “Or let him see your face, at the very least. He has even less reason to trust you as you do to trust him.”

“He’s been off the grid for two years,” Red says. “Deltarune lied about him being a judge. Fuck only knows where he’s been or what he’s been doing. I’m not gonna trust him just because he’s my--”

The words choke in his throat. They’re too stupid to say out loud.

Edge tucks Red’s helmet into his inventory, because apparently they’re all shuffling each other’s stuff around today. He says quietly, “You’re not going to kill him.”

Hard to tell if that’s an observation or an order. Either way, Red’s answer is the same. “No, I ain’t gonna kill him. Happy now?”

“Delighted beyond measure,” Edge says. “It’d be rather inconvenient if you died.”

The affection-with-plausible-deniability snark is a transparent attempt to get Red to chill the fuck out, and Red’s willing to let it work this time around. He snorts. “Yeah, you’d just wander out into traffic to rescue a stray bunny. Don’t do anything stupid like try to talk to him without me or Undyne on deck to back you up if he gets murdery, all right?”

“I’ll be careful,” Edge says, which isn’t _no, Red, I definitely won’t try to chat up our probably-dangerous prisoner._ “Keep me informed.”

With a vague wave of his hand and absolutely no promises, Red walks out of the brig. He doesn’t take a shortcut; he needs a couple minutes to get his head on straight. By the time he gets back to his room, the door closed to keep the world out, he’s calm. He’s fine. His voice is perfectly even as he says, “S’pose you heard all that, G.”

“I hear everything,” Gaster says. “Often several everythings at once. I like him.”

Red remembers Sans asking about the baby AI, the one currently using Gaster’s network access to download all the information they can get their greedy little hands on, and sighs. “Yeah, I bet you do.”

Pointedly, Gaster says, “I’ve pulled up several interesting case studies about soulbonds, if you’re interested.”

“I’m not.” Red drops onto his narrow bed, which bears a not insignificant resemblance to the cot in Sans’s cell. Under the mattress, there’s a bottle of old Fell moonshine he keeps for special occasions. He pulls it out and takes a swig. Yeah, it’s like five in the morning, but if any morning deserves some heavy drinking, it’s definitely this one. Bottle in hand, he props his boots up on the bedrail and says, “Tell me about Unity.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: mention of vomiting; imprisonment; aftermath of Red drugging Sans and Sans taking stims; food insecurity; past solitary confinement, emotional manipulation and sensory deprivation; reference to Red trying to kill Edge in the past.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

Edge waits fifteen minutes before he tells one of the crew to fetch food and a stim. 

Red is the only one on the ship who has access to stims (he damned well better be the only one, or Edge will have some sharp words for their crew) and he didn’t think to leave one for Sans before he left. (Fled is probably a more accurate description.) Given that Red is usually thinking at least three steps ahead, that lapse says a great deal. The situation is relatively stable at the moment. Edge can spare Red those fifteen minutes of peace.

He can also spare the unlucky crewmate in question fair warning that Red will be in an unforgiving mood. Which is why Edge chose Barry for the job. Everything tends to roll off Barry’s broad, furry shoulders; he doesn’t take what he calls ‘politics’ personally, and he seems to consider everything politics.

With that handled, Edge finally drops into the chair in front of the surveillance monitor. For the first time, he lets the full weight of the situation rest on his shoulders. Red’s soulmate is in one of their cells. Sans is possibly dangerous, possibly in danger, but most likely both at the same time. And Edge has no idea what to do about it.

Sans’s ribs rise and fall erratically. Edge taps into the audio feed to check on him, catches a truly awful pun about patellas, and turns the sound off again. Sans’s voice has gained a faint rasp from exhaustion and overuse. Hard to tell if he’s trying to annoy them into letting him go or if he simply can’t stand the silence.

(Stretch couldn’t when they found him. He still can’t, on the bad days.)

“Gaster,” Edge says, not taking his eyes off Sans. “Tell me about soulmates.”

“I’ve already compiled a meta-analysis of case studies,” Gaster says. “I’m glad _someone_ is interested in my hard work. You’d think Red would have more intellectual curiosity.”

Edge isn’t surprised. Eventually Red will want all the information he can get his hands on, but right now he’ll throw himself headlong into the much safer question of what threat Sans is running from and whether it’s following him to their door. Threat assessment doesn't require Red to deal with the emotions he likes to pretend he doesn't have.

“He’s busy,” is all Edge says to Gaster. “I’m listening.”

Gaster clears a throat he doesn't actually have and begins, “Soulmarks began appearing on monsters a few years before the discovery of void travel and the mass exodus from Earth and its colonies--”

“Gaster,” Edge says. “When I said I was listening, I wasn't asking to relive my ancient history schoolfeed."

“This is relevant,” Gaster says impatiently. “I’m explaining the unacceptable lack of information, even though there once was a large population sample of monsters who found their soulmates. The records were lost, and information passed down verbally by creatures with an unreliable organic memory quickly turns into bullshit.”

“If I agree not to judge you for the results of our squishy failings, will you get to the fucking point?” Edge asks.

“So long as you understand who’s at fault,” Gaster sniffs. “Anyway, if Sans dies, at least by accident or natural causes or anyone’s hands but Red’s, it seems he won’t take Red with him. Probably.”

“Probably?” Edge says sharply.

“There was a case of someone with very low HP Falling Down shortly after their soulmate died, but monsters have been known to die of grief,” Gaster says. “I doubt that will be the case for Red.”

Edge says nothing. He remembers what his brother became when he thought he had nothing left. Red hadn’t died of grief, no; he’d made sure it was a fatal condition for everyone the tyrant pointed him at instead. But there had been precious little left of him when he finally came limping home. Too little food, too little sleep, too many wounds he didn’t bother to heal. He wouldn’t have survived another job. Luckily, Edge had been the last assignment the tyrant ever sent him on.

“And it seems that there’s no need for them to stay together,” Gaster says. “If Sans were to escape and never come back, it won’t harm Red. Or vice versa, if you should happen to be concerned about that at all.”

It’s amazing that the acid sweetness of that last sentence didn’t melt Gaster’s speakers. Edge says mildly, “Your misgivings are noted.” And privately agreed with. “Anything else?”

Gaster sighs. “There’s some data suggesting that being near one’s soulmate helps with immunity and wound recovery, and it can raise base HP. Considering how often people try to kill Red for various reasons, a higher base HP could come in handy. The Temmie armor can’t protect him from everything.”

As if Edge isn’t painfully aware of that. “But as far as you can tell, distance won’t hurt them?”

“That’s what the research suggests,” Gaster says. “Of course, seeing as most soulmates choose to stay together once they’ve found each other, it’d be rather unfortunate to find out I was wrong when it’s too late.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Edge says. If anyone could track Sans down across the whole universe, it would be Red. He rubs his aching brow. “We were taught on Fell that soulmarks were meant to bring together monsters that would produce the hardiest offspring.”

The schoolfeeds did not account for the fact that yesterday, Edge’s brutally practical brother chose the least practical ship possible to hijack. Sans’s ship was on a main shipping lane. Stalled or not, there had been better prey. Undyne pointed that out at top volume. But Red had that same look in his eyes that had brought them to Stretch’s colony, like a hunting hound with a scent. So Edge agreed.

And they found Sans.

“How like Fell to tell you that it wasn’t for love but for survival of the fittest,” Gaster says.

Edge shrugs one shoulder. If there was one thing Fell excelled at, it was propaganda. 

Gaster continues, "Worry not, captain. There have been plenty of soulbonds over the years that don't involve sex or romance, let alone procreation. Honestly, the universe shudders at the thought of the hellspawn that Red would undoubtedly produce. No offense intended, of course.”

Edge huffs a laugh. “None taken. My brother would agree with you on that.”

Unexpectedly, Stretch asks, “On what? He never agrees with anything.”

Edge looks up and finds Stretch in the doorway to the brig, precariously balancing two mugs, a datapad in the crook of his elbow, and a deck of cards. His grin does welcome things to Edge's soul.

Never before has Edge been so glad that he listens to Gaster on a private frequency. Stretch could have only heard one side of that conversation, which was hopefully less revealing. It depends on how long Stretch was eavesdropping.

"Hey, baby," Stretch says. Rather than doing the sensible thing and asking for help, he starts to shuffle forward. Edge intercepts him, carefully plucking both mugs out of his hands to free them. Stretch makes a face at him. “I had that handled.”

“I didn’t doubt you for a moment,” Edge tells him. “It was gravity that questioned your decisions.”

“Funny guy,” Stretch says with a roll of his eyes. He looks at the monitor. “How’s he doing?”

Ignoring the question, Edge says, “You know, I seem to recall asking someone else to bring the meal.”

“Yeah, well,” Stretch says with a shrug. “Barry looked pretty busy, and I was on my way to this side of the ship.”

“What an unlikely coincidence,” Edge says. Stretch beams shamelessly, and Edge represses a smile. “Did you bring a stim?”

“Yep.” Stretch produces the blister-wrapped pill from the pocket of his hoodie. “You wanna tell me why Red’s drinking this early in the morning?”

Edge winces. It's not unexpected, but also not a good sign. “As soon as I can tell you, I will.”

“Yeah, I gotcha,” Stretch says. He knows what Red is like, for better or worse. He bounces restlessly on his toes a few times. “I brought you some miso too. I know you probably didn’t have breakfast.”

“Thank you,” Edge says. He ate a ration bar earlier, but he’s not going to mention it. He’ll eat the miso and be damned happy that Stretch thought of him.

The miso is still hot. Stretch can't have been eavesdropping long. Good. As Edge drinks deeply from the mug, Stretch says, “I got deeper into Deltarune’s records."

Edge raises a brow. "Excellent news. What did you find?"

"Well, it turns out Papyrus was an ambassador for a while," Stretch says. "Deltarune didn't get too ambitious about politics, but he negotiated trade deals. Seems he was good at it, too, ‘til one day Deltarune’s king sent him out to figure out terms for another deal and whoops, wouldn’t you know it, the embassy said Papyrus never showed up.”

Edge frowns. “Going missing seems to be a habit for their family.”

“Sure does,” Stretch says. “Sans took off after him a couple weeks later. Papyrus came home. Sans didn’t.”

“Where is Papyrus now?” Edge asks.

“He quit a year and a half ago,” Stretch says. “Left Deltarune, too. His passport says he’s been hopping from place to place since then.”

“Looking for his brother,” Edge says.

Stretch’s smile is bitter. “Wouldn’t you?”

In Edge’s case, it’s not a hypothetical. When Red was lost, Edge wouldn’t rest until he found him. When they told him Red was dead, his dust scattered in the line of duty, Edge refused to believe it. And when Red finally came to kill Edge, his mind and memory broken, Edge had been waiting for him.

Stretch’s brother is never coming home again. 

“Something hinky is definitely going on,” Stretch says. “But does Red even have a plan here? What’re we doing, baby?”

“At the moment, we’re feeding him another cup of miso,” Edge says. When Stretch narrows his eyes, Edge holds up a hand for peace. “There’s been a further complication. Red needs time to think.”

“And drink,” Stretch says.

“Apparently.”

Stretch’s brows rise. “That bad, huh?”

“Not bad, necessarily,” Edge says, taking a sidelong glance at the surveillance monitor where Sans is still telling Gaster terrible jokes. “Unexpected.”

Like a coward, he dodges any follow-up question by turning to the tray dispenser set in the wall. He puts the second cup of miso and the stim on it. Before he can send it through, Stretch says, “Hold up, this is for him too.”

Stretch holds out the deck of playing cards.

“Love,” Edge begins.

Rolling his eyes, Stretch says, “Look, if he can break out of the brig and kill us all with a card deck, then we’re screwed anyway. Even you couldn’t pull that off.”

“Your flattery is as shameless as you are,” Edge says.

Stretch grins. “It’s gonna work, though.”

Edge thinks of Stretch those first few months, exhausted and lost, terrified to be alone, desperately searching for the next distraction to keep his ghosts at bay. He thinks of Sans talking himself hoarse in the cell. When he takes the cards from Stretch’s hand, it has nothing to do with Stretch’s flattery. 

“You’re not going to get these back,” Edge warns. 

“S’okay,” Stretch says. “They’re not mine anyway. Found ‘em in one of the boxes of electronics I, uh, _liberated_ at the last port.”

Fondly, Edge says, “Pirate."

Stretch snorts. “That’s cute, but I was like this before you met me. Now c’mon, give the big scary judge his miso before it gets cold.”

Edge adds the cards to the tray and pushes the button to send it through. On the monitor, Sans jerks upright on the cot and looks at the tray like he thinks it might contain explosives. The grin stays fixed on his face even as his eyelights shrink to pinpricks.

“Poor guy,” Stretch says softly. “What the hell happened to him?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Edge says. “He’s not been particularly forthcoming, for understandable reasons.”

“Really?” Stretch says. “But we’ve been so friendly.”

Which is why Edge is sorely tempted to hand Stretch the comm and let him try to coax answers from Sans. Stretch is charming and friendly, and more importantly, he didn’t hold Sans at knifepoint. But Edge is painfully aware of the damage (physical and psychological) a judge could do to Stretch, who carries LV and puts on an excellent front to cover how badly the death of his colony scarred him.

“You should get back to work, love,” Edge says.

Stretch leans indolently against a wall. “Nah. I’m on my legally mandated break.”

“I wasn’t aware that law applied to pirates,” Edge says. “Fine, then. You should check on Red.”

“No can do, cap’n,” Stretch says. “He said he needed a couple hours alone to concentrate. Got any more reasons for me to be somewhere not here?”

“Other than your safety and my sanity?” Edge asks. “I have Gaster as backup. Three of us don’t need to stand here and watch him eat soup.”

Stretch looks over Edge’s shoulder at the monitor. “Uh, except he’s not eating it.”

Thank fuck Sans doesn’t seem inclined to kill them all; Edge has let himself be dangerously distracted. Red would be furious.

Edge turns sharply back to the monitor and finds that Stretch is right. Sans hasn’t touched the tray, although there’s desperate hunger in his eyes. The kind of hunger that gnaws, keeping you awake at night. It’s been a long time since Edge went that hungry, but it’s not something one can forget. Sans seems just as fixated on the cards as the food. But he doesn’t move.

Undyne mentioned that Sans didn’t touch the first cup of miso until she gave him a good verbal prod and his hunger apparently won out over his hesitation. The fact that he survived breakfast should have made him less worried about poison.

Stretch asks, “What is he waiting for?”

***

Sans stares at the tray. The cup. The stim. The cards. He knows his fingers are digging bruises into his patellas as he grips them tight to keep from blindly, greedily snatching up the offerings. The expression on his face is probably screaming things he doesn't want them to know, but he can't quite keep it under control when he’s burning so much mental bandwidth in the battle between temptation and bitter experience.

He waits, counting the seconds as they pass. It’s almost two minutes before the comm clicks on and someone says in Trade, “Is there a problem?”

It’s a new voice, deep and rich, pleasant to listen to. Sans feels it, like raw silk rubbing over his bones, which goes to show just how fucking tired and overclocked he is. Being trapped in a cell isn't doing his psyche any favors.

When he doesn’t say anything, too busy trying to reckon with the fact that he’s desperate enough for company to want to roll around in this (probably hostile) stranger’s voice like a cat in a sunbeam, they say, “It’s yours. Eat.”

Even though he tells himself to take the cup like he’s in no rush, his hunger overrides his intentions; he grabs the cup hastily enough that a bit of soup sloshes onto his fingers. He licks it off. He’s not gonna waste it, even if his fingers taste a little like engine grease. The soup is just as good as he remembered. Still blissfully warm, too.

He takes a sip, carefully not looking directly at the deck of cards. He has to play it cool. Can’t let them know how badly he wants it without that being used against him sooner or later. Which it will anyway, probably. That’s the only motivation he can see for them giving it to him in the first place.

(Or they’re trying to be nice.) 

(Yeah, right. And maybe they’ll realize this is a big misunderstanding and drop him off at the next port with a few hundred gold and a handwritten apology. That’d be just swell.)

After a moment, Sexy Voice says, “For future reference, you don’t need permission to eat. Not here.”

A long-held knot of tension around Sans’s soul loosens. It aches a little, like circulation returning to a numb limb after a too-tight handcuff was removed. Stupid reaction. Even stupider to trust anything they tell him. They sound like they’re telling the truth, or at least what they think is the truth, but he can’t know for sure without seeing their face. 

He takes a couple more sips of the soup. Hopefully it’ll steady his nerves a little. And his hands, for that matter, which are trembling from stim withdrawal. So generous of them to offer him a fix, probably from his own supply, but he’s not touching it. He knows how this works. If Red wants Sans all suggestible and panicky for the next interrogation, they’ll have to come in here and shove the stim down his throat themselves.

But the cards…

Finally, Sans lets himself really look at the deck of cards. They clearly belong to somebody; they’re weathered and soft on the corners from hard use, held together by a rubber band that’s seen better days. He taps the tray beside the card deck and tries to sound like only mildly curious. “What’re these for?”

“Solitaire, most likely," Sexy Voice says. “You can try to play poker by yourself, I suppose. I admit I’d be curious to see how you’d manage it.”

What the fuck.

“Why?” Sans asks. It’s meant to be an easy and conversational question, but it comes out as sharp as Red’s knife against the soft magic between his vertebra. He readjusts his grin, takes another sip of soup to buy himself a moment, and tries again. “I mean, you steal my ship and throw me in your brig, and then you give me a pack of cards to while away the hours? I’m getting some mixed messages here.”

“Considering how our attempt to hijack your ship went, it seems like a good idea to keep you from getting bored,” Sexy Voice says.

 _Our_ attempt. Interesting. 

Sans drains the mug and sets it aside, then wipes his hands on the sheets. The cards are a precious resource, and he doesn’t want to get anything on them. Carefully, he extracts the cards from the rubber band. They're just a simple deck of playing cards, decorated with nude illustrations of monsters.

“Nice,” Sans says, thumbing through the deck. “Surprisingly tasteful.”

“Excuse me a moment,” Sexy Voice says. 

The comm clicks abruptly off and stays off for almost a minute, like Sexy Voice is having a conversation out there. Or an argument. Sans grabs the cards off the tray just in case Sexy Voice decides to try to take their offerings back.

The comm clicks back on. Sexy Voice says stiffly, “I apologize. If you want another deck, we can find one.”

Instinctively, Sans draws them a little closer to his chest. His now. He's not giving them up unless they offer him one hell of a bargaining chip.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before in person," Sans says casually. Reconsiders. "Well, most of it. The joker card was a new one by me, but I’m not complaining. It’s been a while.”

“Is that so?” Sexy Voice asks, suddenly and dangerously interested. 

Fuck. That’s what Sans gets for letting his guard down. This is still an interrogation even if Red left for a smoke break or something. He grins lazily at the camera. “Sure. I caught something real nasty out in the northern wilds of CS-21 a couple years ago. Maybe you oughta warn Red to take a nice long decontamination shower just in case, seeing as they’re the one that got up close and personal.”

"I’ll tell Red to bear that in mind," Sexy Voice says, dry as dust. They’re noticeably careful not to use a pronoun. “Thank you for your concern.”

Sans scoots backward from the tray, ignoring the stim. As he clumsily shuffles the cards, no mean feat with cuffs on, he asks, “You're the polite pirate, right?"

"I beg your pardon?" Sexy Voice says.

“From yesterday," Sans says. "You and Red were the ones who boarded my ship."

"What makes you think that?”

"Your sense of humor, mostly."

"You must be mistaken. I don’t have a sense of humor.”

Sans makes a noncommittal noise. He lays out the cards for solitaire, being careful with them. Downright _reverent_ with them, if he's honest. Good thing he's never honest.

He turns the first of the cards on the stock pile over. Finds a card he can’t even play. The joker grins up at him with an impressive mouthful of sharp chompers. They remind him of Red. He’s not sure why. Sheer attitude, maybe. He sets the card aside for later.

“It’s real considerate of you to worry some dirty pictures are gonna make me uncomfortable,” Sans says, drawing another card. Ace of spades. Ain’t that lucky. “But y’know, if you really wanna be a polite host, you could do me a solid and drop me off at the nearest port.”

“I’m afraid that’s not an option at the moment,” Sexy Voice says. 

Not as afraid as Sans is. He grins tiredly down at the cards. “Well, it was worth a shot, since you’re playing the nice pirate to Red’s mean pirate.”

"Nice _and_ polite," Sexy Voice says. "Most people whose ships I hijacked aren't nearly so complimentary."

“You probably don't bring them presents," Sans says. "Food, entertainment, drugs… I'm really getting the gold star treatment."

"I'm not sure what treatment you're used to, but giving you food when you're starving and we’re responsible for your care doesn't qualify as a present," Sexy Voice says, their tone ever so slightly edged with anger. Either that’s genuine righteous indignation on his behalf (unlikely) or Sexy Voice is starting to lose their patience with him and/or the nicey-nice bullshit act. Time to be careful.

"Starving is kind of an overdramatic way to put it," Sans says. 

Okay, that probably doesn’t count as careful.

"You have magic deficits from what seems to be long-term food deprivation," Sexy Voice says. "What would you call it?"

Surviving, that's what Sans would call it. He didn't even really notice how pale his magic had gotten until he saw another skeleton again and had a basis of comparison.

Instead of answering, Sans asks, "Guess I've got a stims deficit too, huh?"

That gives Sexy Voice pause. Sounding like they’re choosing their words very carefully, they say, "You had them in your system when we found you."

"It was a long drive," Sans says.

Sexy Voice isn't even in the room, but Sans gets the distinct feeling that they're looking at his trembling hands. He waits for the oh-so-reasonable argument. He's in withdrawal. He's exhausted as it is. They're only thinking of his well-being. He'll feel so much better if he just takes the stim like a good boy. Sexy Voice is the velvet glove to Red’s iron fist. It’s a classic interrogation technique for a reason.

But all they say is, "Do you want the stim?"

The hell of the thing is that some part of Sans does want it, just to take the edge off the discomfort. Just to steady his hands and soothe the weary ache of his bones. He could very easily convince himself that taking a stim would be the smart decision. The _necessary_ decision. He pulls another card and stares at it without actually seeing it. "Nope."

"All right," Sexy Voice says, like it's simple. Like what Sans wants actually matters. "Are you finished with the cup?”

“Ain’t much left I can do with it, buddy.” On further consideration, he muses, “I guess I could try to eat it.”

“In a few hours, you can have more soup,” Sexy Voice says. “There’s no need to eat the cup it comes in, I assure you.”

“Oh, well, if you _assure_ me,” Sans says mildly. “Lemme think. I could wear it like a hat?”

“As fetching as that would be, you don’t sound particularly committed to the idea,” Sexy Voice deadpans. A genuine grin tugs at the corners of Sans’s mouth. They continue, “Shall I take the tray, then?”

Sans shrugs. “What’re you asking me for? It’s your tray. Your brig, too. Your ship. Your cuffs. Your cell.”

They don’t have an answer for that. The tray retracts into the wall, taking the stim with it. He’s braced for a last minute surge of panic, but it doesn’t come. All he feels is relief that makes him weaker than the panic would’ve. He’s used to panic by now. He leans down to study the slot in the wall, which coincidentally lets him turn his face away from the unblinking eye of the camera.

“Nice work on the tray mechanism, by the way,” Sans says, his voice a little rough. “Smooth. Your engineer really knows what they’re doing.”

“I’ll pass along your compliments,” Sexy Voice says. There’s a long pause. When they speak again, it’s almost gentle. “There’s a doctor on board who could give you something to help with the withdrawal.”

Sans laughs. “Yeah, I bet they could. Much as I love taking drugs from strangers, I’ll pass.”

“As you like,” Sexy Voice says, unoffended. Still (Sans is almost sure now) gentle. That gentleness is more dangerous than Red’s anger could ever be.

All at once, Sans is too fucking tired to deal with this shit. He folds the cards back together. They’re a trap, but he doesn’t have it in him to tell Sexy Voice to take them back. He’s careful when he wraps them back up in the rubber band and sets them beside the bed. Then he stretches out on his back and yawns. “Welp, I appreciate the friendly chat, but I oughta catch some z’s before Red comes back. I wanna be at my best for the interrogation. You know how it is.” 

That’s the point that he expects them to turn the lights on, bright and burning and inescapable. He expects the blast of loud, chaotic noise through the speakers. They might’ve let him refuse the stims, but sleep deprivation is better than drugs when it comes to getting information or just breaking someone down. Easy-peasy.

The room stays blessedly dark. Quiet, too, thick enough to choke on. He always forgets how quiet it gets in a soundproof room when he stops talking to himself. It echoes in his skull, filling it with static. His soul clenches tight. This is the least convincing fake nap he’s ever taken, seeing as he can’t even make himself close his eyes. 

He rolls over to put his back to the camera and just stares at the wall, glad he doesn’t have to blink. There. No one could possibly tell that he’s not sleeping, aside from the fact that his shoulders are up around his acoustic meatus and that the AI is probably monitoring his vital signs and reporting every panicky beat of his soul. He’s a master of deception.

There’s a soft sound, a rustle of cloth, like they’re reaching out to turn the comm off.

“Wait,” Sans says, the word jerked involuntarily out of him. They wait. The silence is expectant. He swallows hard. “I, uh. I got a question.”

“I may not answer, but you can certainly ask,” Sexy Voice says.

That’s fair. Sans doesn’t really know what he was going to ask anyway. He skims his tongue over his dry teeth, trying to think of something. The flash of inspiration that comes is more like a cigarette lighter on its last legs, the flint sparking weakly in search of a flame.

Sans asks.

***

“So are you s’posed to be my soulmate?”

Edge probably should have expected this. Of course Sans would ask that question when Stretch was here. Of course Stretch would find out in the worst possible way what Edge and Red have been keeping from him.

He can feel Stretch staring at him. Tempting as it is to be a coward and avoid his gaze, Edge meets his eyes. He sees the anger and hurt he expected, but also something worse. Deep down, Stretch is afraid, as if Edge has been hiding this because he means to abandon Stretch at the first possible opportunity. 

Edge’s finger is still on the comm. Without breaking eye contact with Stretch, he tells them both, “No. I’m not your soulmate.”

Even if Sans wore his mark, Edge loves Stretch. Finding his soulmate wouldn’t change that, and it damned well won’t change Red either. Red’s devotion is hard-won, but once he’s given it, he doesn’t take it back. 

Stretch relaxes, his tension unwinding so sharply and suddenly that he’d probably stagger if he wasn’t slouched against the wall. When Edge starts to take his finger off the comm button, ready to reassure him, Stretch points at the monitor and furiously shakes his head no. He clearly noticed the desperation in Sans’s voice when he told Edge to wait. There’s righteous indignation in his eyes, his jaw stubbornly set. He grabs his datapad and starts tapping away at what is undoubtedly a message about what an asshole Edge is.

“Oh,” Sans says. His tone is as opaque as Red’s can be at times, without the familiar roadmarks of Red’s various moods that Edge has gained over years of knowing his brother better than anyone else ever could. “You guys aren’t very good at this, are you? If you’re gonna keep going with this soulmate bullshit, you’re the obvious choice.”

Stretch is still typing what promises to be an epic rant, so Edge continues the conversation with Sans. “How so?”

“C’mon, dude,” Sans says. “You bring me food and cards and drugs. You’re being nice to me. You’ve got the sexy voice and everything.”

One corner of Stretch’s grin tilts up. He looks up at Edge and shrugs as if to say Sans has a point. Good. He’s not _that_ angry. Thank fuck he can’t hold a grudge like Red would.

Edge is better off leaving the sexy voice comment alone. He says, “You continue to have a questionable definition of nice.” 

“My bad. When I’m not in a pirate brig, I’ll work on raising my standards,” Sans says. His easy calm is barbed on its edges, so sharp as to leave someone bleeding before they even feel the cut. “Seriously, if it’s not you, I dunno who it would be. I haven’t met that many of you. I guess you could go with the engineer?”

Stretch immediately looks up from his datapad, wide-eyed with dawning horror. Edge shakes his head, and Stretch sighs in relief so dramatic that Edge can’t quite suppress a smile. Then a furrow appears between Stretch’s brows. He signs, “Who?" 

“They were pretty nice,” Sans says into the long silence. “Pretty pretty, too, if you know what I mean.”

That distracts Stretch for a moment, thankfully. He grins at the monitor, amused, and then waggles his brows at Edge. He knows he’s pretty, the brat. Edge and Red tell him often enough. 

“I’m aware of what you mean, yes,” Edge says dryly.

“Yeah,” Sans says. “Thought you might be.”

There’s a note in Sans’s voice that Edge recognizes too well from Red, hinting at secrets he knows that by all rights he shouldn’t. _Maybe you know about my brother,_ Sans is telling them, _but I’ve figured out something about you too._

Red’s soulmate indeed.

Doubtless he’s expecting Edge to bristle and bluster and make a critical mistake out of protectiveness or jealousy, or at least to drop any false pretext of civility so that Sans can see what he’s truly dealing with. Edge laughs instead, quietly.

Sans turns his head to look at the camera, wary tension radiating from him. He says, “Uh, okay. You’re in the mood for chuckles. Cool. You wanna hear the one about the Angel walking into a bar?”

As if summoned, someone walks through the entrance to the brig. It’s not the Angel, though. Far from it. It’s Red. There’s none of the fury Edge would’ve expected upon Red finding both him and Stretch here on the comm with Sans. The expression on Red’s face is one Edge is intimately familiar with. There’s trouble.

Edge straightens, taking his finger off the comm button. “What is it?”

Red’s eyelights are sharp, any haze of alcohol burnt away by adrenaline and determination. “I'm letting him out. Turns out me and Sans got some shit to talk about.”

“Okay, that sounds ominous,” Stretch says. He puts his datapad back in his inventory with a sigh. “Lemme guess. This is a need to know--”

“Sit down, honey,” Red says.

Stretch looks uneasily at Edge, searching for answers Edge doesn’t have. Then he slowly sinks into the chair in front of the monitor. His hands come together in his lap, fingertips tapping restlessly together. “Okay. Upgrade that to super ominous. What, you think I’m gonna swoon?”

“I was looking into Unity to figure out what he's running from,” Red says. “Found someone I’ve been keeping an eye out for just in case. A human. Turns out they’re going by a different name these days.”

“Okay?” Stretch says, clearly confused. “Just spit it out, dude.”

Red glances at Edge. That brief moment of eye contact is a warning: things are about to get ugly.

Red says, “I found the guy who killed your brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: past memory erasure and Fellgore using Red as a weapon; past mass murder of Stretch's colony; confinement in a brig; the aftereffects of food deprivation, emotional manipulation and solitary confinement; past Underfell propaganda and kill or be killed bullshit; Edge and Stretch accidentally give Sans playing cards with nude illustrations on them while he's in the brig; past drug use; drug withdrawal. I think that's everything, but let me know if I missed anything?
> 
> Edit: Added a line for the sake of clarity about who killed Blue. Sorry about that!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

Stretch laughs.

It’s not the right reaction. The normal reaction. He always laughs when he first gets hurt, as soon as the pain hits, a reflex like sneezing or a hiccup. That time he accidentally dropped an engine on his foot and broke a couple toes, nobody came to check on him right away because they thought he was just laughing at a joke he thought of. It used to drive Blue crazy.

(He doesn’t want to think of Blue. He never does. It’s not fair because he loves his brother so fucking much, but thinking of him hurts like touching a burn. If he cracks that door even a little, then all the darkness behind it will come crashing in and drown him again.)

(Too late.)

Stretch clamps a hand over his mouth to hold the sick laughter in until he can choke it back. Red just stands there, wearing that not-expression that means he feels things and doesn’t want to make the situation messier by actually letting on that he feels things so he just goes blank. Red thinks only one person is allowed to feel bad at once, and that person is never, ever Red. Which just makes Stretch feel like a crazy person, but Red’s got his own issues and mostly their issues match up but sometimes they’re a mess and--

He’s thinking too fast again. He’ll spin out into a panic attack if he’s not careful. He forces himself to redirect and calm the hell down. Counts in time with his breath like the AI in the therapy module told him. In one, two, three, four. What was her name? Out one, two, three, four. He’s doing this wrong, he’s still thinking things. In one, two--

Fuck it.

Dropping his hand, Stretch tells Red, “You’re wrong. The bastard who killed Blue is dead. I checked his pulse. After. He was--”

So cold. Sticky blood beneath his trembling fingers as he fumbled at that bastard’s neck. Which wasn’t easy to do, since Stretch slit the brotherkiller’s throat open on top of stabbing him a lot, but he felt all along the carotid. Held a mirror to the guy’s lips to check if he was still breathing. He’d been half-dead himself, but he made sure before he crawled as far away from the blood as he could get before he passed out.

But humans don’t dust. They’re stubborn, meaty things. He didn’t burn the body, either Blue’s murderer or the half-dozen other LV hunters that had died in Inverse. (Mostly because he didn’t even think of it until months later. Acute trauma reactions are a bitch.) He didn’t go back to check that the corpse was still rotting in the judgement hall before he let Edge and Red take him off Inverse.

Stretch drags himself out of the remembered stink of iron blood and thick dust in the air. Red is still looking at him like he’d rather be doing anything but telling Stretch this. There’s no way Red would tear open old wounds if he wasn’t damn sure.

Blindly, Stretch reaches out for Edge’s hand. Edge gives it to him, twining their fingers together, lending his silent and steady support. That helps. Now Stretch can say, “Okay. Tell me.”

Red holds up a datapad. On it there’s a couple pictures. A grainy screenshot of a security feed from the main station on Unity, timestamped five days ago. The deed for a property out in the hills, including a satellite photo. A passport with a picture of a thin human man, his blond hair graying and wrinkles at the corners of his pretty blue eyes. The top buttons of his shirt are open to bare the long, ugly scar across his throat where Stretch’s attack carved through his carotid artery.

Edge is saying things. It’s probably important, but Stretch can’t hear it over the frantic hammering of his own pulse in his skull. It was like that in the judgement hall; all Stretch heard was his own screaming and the roar of the blasters. Only that, and the memory of the bastard’s laugh when he turned with the gun in his hand and Blue’s dust on his shoes to find Stretch frozen in the doorway.

The fucking gun wasn’t even loaded. The murderer hated them enough that it didn’t have to be; when he pulled the trigger, his determination was as good as a bullet.

Slowly, Stretch tears his eyes away from the passport photo to look at the name written beside it. Rainier Gray. Probably not any more real than the name he’d given when he boarded the colony to kill them all. Maybe old Mags had seen his real name when she judged him, but if she had, she didn’t have a chance to tell Stretch before she died. He fought Rainier in the judgement hall, but he was no judge. Rainier took that from him too.

His vision swims, and Red takes the datapad away. It takes Stretch a moment to realize he’s tearing up. Another second to realize he forgot to breathe. The therapist module would be so disappointed. He heaves in a hard, shaky breath, and the world swims back into focus.

“Easy, love,” Edge soothes. “Breathe for a minute.”

“I’m okay,” Stretch wheezes. He’s probably crushing Edge’s hand, he’s clutching it so tight. He tries to let go, but Edge gently holds on. With his free hand, Stretch angrily wipes at the tears on his face. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Red says. “You and the boss wanna take a quick walk around the ship, honey? Get some air?”

“So you can plan revenge behind my back where I don’t have to hear about it?” Stretch demands. “He killed my brother. I’m not gonna just--”

“I was thinking ‘cause you’re hyperventilating,” Red says. “If you want revenge, I’ll bring him to you gift-wrapped and lend you my favorite knife.”

“Agreed,” Edge says. His thumb smooths over Stretch’s knuckles like prayer beads, all absent devotion. “Although I can’t say I wouldn’t cherish the opportunity to kill him for you.”

“Eventually,” Red says. “Might take a while.”

Three years ago, Stretch wouldn’t have found that kind of sweet. It’s been a weird few years. He gives Edge’s hand a little squeeze and exhales. Breathe out the anxiety, that’s what the therapy modules say, but the comfort has more to do with Red and Edge. He lies, “I’m okay. How is he still alive?”

“Those humans showed the AI and your people fake passports when they boarded your colony,” Red says. “They pretty much lobotomized the AI once the colony agreed to let them stay. That way the AI couldn’t try to stop them. But what’s left could still keep records of who went in and out. You remember how we set the ship navigation to take it into the black?”

“Yeah,” Stretch says, although most of those first few weeks were a numb, colorless smear. He remembers that they’d asked him if he was okay with that, since Inverse was all the way out on the edge of the settled universe anyway, and he’d been surprised to find that he actually cared enough to answer with a nod. He didn’t want scavengers in what was left of his home. Everyone’s dust had been scattered over all the things they loved. It’d be like digging up a human's coffin and prying rings off desiccated fingerbones. So they’d taken what food and medical supplies they could carry, set the autopilot to avoid ship collisions, and let Inverse drift on a mission to nowhere. 

He never told them that Blue always wanted to see what was out there in the endless black beyond the known universe. Stretch doesn’t really think his brother is still around in some kind of afterlife, but if he’s wrong… well, at least Blue won’t be the only ghost on Inverse. Blue hated to be alone.

“I kept an eye on the records,” Red says. “About five months after we left, Inverse pinged me to say they were being boarded.”

Stretch straightens sharply enough to almost jackknifing out of the chair. “What? You didn’t tell me!”

“What the hell were you gonna do about it, honey?” Red asks. “Inverse was way out past the reach of the void drive by then. We wouldn’t have been able to catch up with them taking it the slow way. Even if we did catch up, the scavenger would have been long gone by the time we got there. They were only docked seven minutes before they bailed.”

All perfectly good reasons. And Red is nice enough not to bring up that Stretch was still a fucking basketcase back then, one who didn’t talk much, drifted through his days, and hid under Red’s bed when the world got too terrifying. Finding out that scavengers were picking at Inverse’s corpse when he couldn’t stop it would have just been grinding salt in the wound. Helplessly, Stretch says, “I know, but...”

“Yeah,” Red says when Stretch trails off. He looks tired as hell. “Sorry.”

And he really is. Makes it hard to stay mad at him. Stretch slumps back into the chair and looks at Edge. Judging from the _we will discuss this later_ look Edge is giving Red, Red didn’t tell him either. That shouldn’t make Stretch feel better, but it does.

“You’re saying the man who killed Blue survived having his throat cut and was lurking in a dead ship for five months?” Edge asks skeptically. It’s strange to hear him say Blue's name. It’s the two halves of Stretch's life colliding: before Rainier Gray and after.

“I know it’s fucking ridiculous, but yeah,” Red says. “I figured some scavenger just poked his head in, got spooked and bailed. The records said only one guy went in and only one guy left. Rainier must’ve killed them, jacked their ship and flown back. Showed up on Unity about six months later with a bunch of forged records and a shitton of money.”

“What was he doing on Unity?” Edge asks.

“See, that’s the hilarious thing,” Red says. “He’s registered as non-denominational clergy. Turns out he runs some sorta church outside city limits.”

Stretch caws a laugh that’s a little hysterical. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Edge holds out a hand for the datapad, and Red hands it over. After a moment of paging through, Edge says, “I’ll admit I don’t know much about religion, but that seems like a rather large property for a church.”

“Church says it’s a halfway house for ‘lost souls’,” Red says, with fingerquotes and as much of a sneer as that deserves. “Addicts, mostly. Records say they’ve got a couple dozen people staying there, but the satellites have a suspicious habit of going out. This is the only good shot I could find. That’s why I dug deeper and figured out who owns it.”

“Addicts,” Edge says, with a sidelong glance at the monitor showing Sans in the brig, fiddling with the cards again. “He refused the stims.”

Red’s brows rise. “Really.”

“Yeah,” Stretch says with dawning horror. “He looked so fucking relieved when Edge said he didn’t have to take it. Like he thought we were gonna make him.”

Red turns his head to stare at the monitors. There’s a complicated look in his eyes, but his expression is eerily blank. After a moment, he says, “Did it occur to you that he might be working for Rainier?”

“Uh, no, because there’s no reason to think that on account of it being crazypants,” Stretch says. “Seriously, is this a sunk cost fallacy thing? Why do you want so bad for Sans to be--”

Red cuts him off. “I’m not saying Rainier didn’t fuck him over. But enough mindfucking and you can convince people to do damned near anything for you just to make it stop. If you’re _real_ good at it, you can even make ‘em think it was their choice.”

Edge’s grip on Stretch’s hand tightens just a little. But when Stretch glances at him, Edge’s expression is carefully neutral. Which answers a whole fuckton of things Stretch has wondered about Red and Edge’s past while also opening up brand new, even more disturbing questions. 

Apparently it’s the day where everybody gets kicked in the trauma. Somebody must’ve forgotten to mark that down on Stretch’s calendar. He’d have had some honey whiskey with his coffee this morning just to brace himself.

“Either way, he’s our best chance of finding out what Rainier or whatever his fucking name is doing now,” Stretch says. “If you really thought he was a threat, you wouldn’t have said you’d let him out of the cell.”

“Why not? We got a lot of threats walking around this ship all the time,” Red says. “Can’t even keep two of ‘em out of your bed.”

“Yeah, but the sex is amazing,” Stretch says. Edge cracks a smile and Red looks smug, which Stretch likes a whole lot better than blankness. “Lemme talk to him.”

“ _We’ll_ talk to him,” Red says pointedly. 

“Uh, yeah, no offense, but you don’t have the most delicate touch in the world, dude,” Stretch says.

“Didn’t hear you complaining last night,” Red says.

Stretch snorts. Then he feels a little bad for laughing because why should there be any laughter in his world when Rainier is alive and Blue is dead?

Because life isn’t fair, but Blue would still want him to live it. That’s why. He can almost see Blue giving him that bright smile that meant, in the nicest possible way, that Stretch needed to get his shit together or Blue was going to drape him over one shoulder and drag him to the garden for some nice therapeutic hard labor. Which meant Blue did the hard labor while Stretch took a nap under a nearby tree.

God, Stretch misses him.

“Okay, maybe at least try to be a little bit less of an asshole?” Stretch says. “We need him.”

“You need him,” Red mutters, sounding downright sullen about it.

Something finally occurs to Stretch. A question he asked Edge that never got an answer; he was a little too distracted to remember that until now. With the care of defusing a bomb, he asks, “Hey, so whose soulmate is he?”

Red’s jaw tightens. He starts inputting his security code to unlock the door. It’s a pretty transparent excuse not to look at anybody as he says gruffly, “Doesn’t matter right now.”

Oh, now there’s an answer and a half even before Stretch looks at Edge for confirmation. Edge gives that same apologetic grimace he did when Sans let the soulmate cat out of the bag in the first place.

It stings less than it would if it was Edge. Not because Stretch loves Red any less, even though the stubborn asshole refuses to admit he’s as much a part of this relationship as they are. Stretch knows Edge would never abandon him no matter what his dumb neuroses tell him, but Edge would react to a sudden soulmate like the universe offloaded a half-drowned kitten on his doorstep and it’s his responsibility now. That’s a big thing for Edge, deciding something is his _responsibility_. He’s a real “if nobody’s gonna deal with this, I will” kind of guy. He would care. Edge doesn’t know how to care about things halfway.

But Red, he's way more likely to tell universal casuality to fuck itself because it doesn’t get to tell him what to do. It explains a lot about Red’s paranoid hateboner for Sans, that’s for sure. Edge probably had to stop Red from immediately trying to throw Sans out the nearest airlock. The problem there is gonna be trying to get Red to chill out long enough for them to actually talk to Sans and then drop him off wherever he wants to go, before or after they deal with Rainier Gray.

… Okay, yeah, maybe Edge has rubbed off on Stretch in more than the literal sense, because Sans looks an awful lot like a feline of the half-drowned variety who could use a saucer of milk, a bath and a nice basket in front of the fire. (Well, a metaphorical saucer of milk, anyway; Edge has Opinions about feeding cats dairy.) He seems to be holding it together surprisingly well, considering, but the strain is starting to show. It seems wrong to just drop him at a random port and tell him to figure out that drug withdrawal, malnutrition and trauma thing by himself with no doctors, no money, and no way home. Red would probably say that Stretch is feeling dangerously soft and squishy on account of their shared enemy, but Red also didn’t leave Stretch back on Inverse even though Stretch could’ve been an unhinged murderer, so. Glass houses, etc. 

Despite the shitty situation, Stretch can’t resist the urge to ask with wide-eyed innocence, “But what if their soulmate wants to sit in on the interrogation, Red?”

Red gives Stretch a searing look. His eyes narrow. Then he leans in and presses a kiss to Stretch’s mouth. Red murmurs like he’s afraid someone will overhear, “I ain’t leaving you, dipshit. I love you.”

Those three little words from Red’s mouth are so rare and so precious that Stretch feels warm to his toes despite everything. Loudly enough for the world to hear, he says, “I love you too, you softie.”

Red winces and pulls away. “You’re gonna ruin my rep.”

Edge says dryly, “Your reputation survived Undyne and I stumbling upon you in the midst of a drunken marathon of The Robot Who Loved Me. Specifically parts 4 through 7. You'll be fine."

“Fuck off, boss.” After taking his hand off the keypad, Red has to retype his security code. He stops at the last number, looking at Stretch. For a moment, Stretch thinks Red’s about to ask him if he’s sure about this, at which point Stretch will yell at him, but Red just asks, “You ready?” 

Probably not. Stretch says, “Quit fingering the button and stick it in already.”

“Okay,” Red says. (Does he hesitate, like he’s not sure _he’s_ ready to deal with this? Maybe. Or maybe it’s Stretch’s imagination.) “Here’s hoping he’s as harmless as you think he is.”

The cell door opens.

***

It's been awhile since the comm went dead, but the sound insulation isn't so good that Sans can't hear the faint murmur of voices in the hall. Not what they're saying, but that they're there, there's more than two of them, and they sound upset. He thinks he recognizes Red’s voice.

In retrospect, he definitely should have kept his fucking mouth shut about the engineer. Rule number 42 of long-term captivity: don’t piss off the people with the keys to your cell and access to an airlock.

Maybe their little impromptu confab isn't even about him. Maybe it's engine trouble. Or lunch got delivered and the order was wrong. Hey, since he's dreaming big, maybe somebody from Deltarune is finally here to bring him home, political liability or no. Give it a day or so and he’ll be back in his own bedroom, getting fussed over by Papyrus, gobbling all the awful spaghetti he can eat. Safe.

… Yeah, no, somebody is totally gonna come here and beat the shit out of him. If they don’t save themselves some time and food supplies and just fucking shoot him.

He has nowhere to run. No way to survive a fight against a shipload of pirates. But Papyrus would want him to at least try to get out in one piece, preferably without killing anybody. Probably not a great sign that he’s mostly keeping himself alive by habit and the distant memory of Papyrus’s affectionate scolding.

He sighs loudly, like he’s exasperated by these shenanigans in the hall wasting his valuable napping time, and grabs the deck of cards before sitting up in bed. When he put the cards away, he tucked the joker in the very front of the deck. As he undoes the binding and makes a show of shuffling like he’s just trying to give his idle hands something to do, he stealthily folds the joker card once, twice. Luckily enough, the card stock is sturdy enough to make a little wedge, a makeshift shim narrow enough to slip into the cuffs’ shackle-tightening mechanism. With some finagling, he can maybe widen the cuffs enough to let his hands slip out.

(He wonders if Papyrus knows Sans remembers every word of those impromptu lectures on escape artistry. If he knows that Sans was paying attention at all. Maybe not. Sans is a shitty brother sometimes. He’ll have to do better when he gets home.)

(Ha.)

He tucks the shim in between his metacarpals. Holding his phalanges like that is going to give him one motherfucker of a wrist cramp in a couple minutes, but for now, he’s golden. 

"Hey," Sans says casually. "What did the werewolf say to the AI?”

The AI is spared his terrible punchline because the cell door opens. Sans’s attention darts to the doorway, to the person standing there and he freezes because--

(Because when he sees their naked face, something that’s been silent all his life whispers: _Oh. It’s you. I’ve been looking for you._ )

\-- because it takes him a second to place them. He knows that armor, those sheathed knives, but Red’s always worn a helmet. Sans eventually figured out they were a monster, because Red’s a judge and humans can’t be, but he didn’t know they were another skeleton. He didn’t know their face was scarred, a truly vicious crack in their skull, the glint of gold in their shark-toothed maw. 

It’s kind of unfortunate that in any other circumstances, they’d be the kind of person he’d pick up in a bar for a tumble in the sheets. Or an alley. He’s not picky. (Of course, the fact that they’re at LV 8 would have made him decide to get his dick wet somewhere else.) But hey, seeing as Red’s is probably the last face he’ll ever see, at least he’ll have something nice to look at on his way out. 

Red doesn’t storm in and dust him. They also don’t drag him outside the cell and kill him out there to save themselves some vacuuming later. They don’t reach for a knife. They don’t beat the shit out of him. They just stand there and look at him like they aren’t impressed. Not much left to see, probably. Error: person not found.

Sans could try to shove past them, but there’s no point. Well, no, the problem is there _is_ a point on the knife Red would shove right in his eyesocket for being a dipshit.

“Hey, pal,” Sans says. Hopefully Red thinks the tremble in his hands as he stacks the cards back together (shim still stashed between his aching metacarpals) is a side effect of the withdrawal. “If you leave the door open, you’re letting all that good prison stink out. Seems like a waste.”

“Get up,” Red says. 

Nothing good is gonna come of letting Red take him anywhere. Hell, nothing good is gonna come of Red letting Sans see their face like they’re not afraid he’ll survive long enough to identify them.

“Taking me walkies?” Sans asks as he slips the rubber band on the deck of cards. He takes his time, stalling to give himself time to think of something, but it’s like trying to turn over an engine with no gas in the tank. He’s got nothing. “To the airlock, maybe?”

“Nah,” Red says. Their gaze dips briefly to Sans’s hands, but they don’t linger like Red’s noticed the card Sans (metaphorically) palmed. “I decided not to kill you unless you do something stupid. Congrats.”

“Okay, see, this is why we can’t have nice things,” says someone in the hallway. The pretty engineer comes close enough to the door that he can see them leaning over Red’s shoulder. “Listen, we’re really not gonna kill you. Pinky swear. You’re a judge, so you know I’m not lying.”

Bullshit. Red might’ve been telling the truth, although it’s hard to know whether to trust his own read on that, but the engineer’s easy grin is a blatant lie. They were crying a couple minutes ago, he'd bet money on it. And there’s something else that he can’t quite--

Oh, fuck. He can’t believe he missed it before. Sure, he’d been drugged at the time, but he should’ve seen it from the start. The engineer’s LV 2, yeah, that’s relevant info to have, but it’s not the worst part. 

Flatly, Sans asks, “Is everybody on this ship a judge, or is somebody starting a collection?”

Been there, done that, didn’t much enjoy it.

The engineer blinks. Red’s eyes narrow to slits. The engineer says warily, “Uh, I’m not a judge.”

Huh. They don’t look like they’re deliberately lying. Just wrong. But what’s weirder is that Red actually looks surprised, and Red damned well ought to be able to recognize a judge when they see one. 

Sans takes a second look because hell, he might just be straight-up seeing things. Fuck knows the engineer didn’t set off the judge’s bristling like Red did. But no, the judge’s fingerprints are all over the engineer clear as day.

Whatever. Not his problem. Sans shrugs. “My mistake. So if you’re not here to kill me, what do you want?”

“We got some more questions,” Red says.

“You didn’t have a problem asking ‘em in here before,” Sans says. “Why so shy now?”

(So much for not antagonizing the captors. He’s really bad at this.)

“C’mon,” the engineer says. Their smile is open and friendly in a way that sets Sans on edge. They clearly want something, and they’re trying to coax him into giving it to them by playing nice. He can’t tell if they’ve got a taser behind their back; they’re kind of hidden behind the bulk of Red’s armor. “It’s gotta be boring as fuck in here.”

“Turns out it’s a lot less boring when you don’t know if you’re going to die,” Sans says.

The engineer winces. “Yeah, listen, I’m really sorry about that. We totally got off on the wrong foot. Red’s overprotective.”

“Also prone to armed shipjacking,” Sans says.

Red shrugs. Their eyes haven’t left Sans once. “Wasn’t your ship. Dunno why you’re taking it so goddamn personally.”

“I was kinda using it at the time,” Sans says. 

“It was _kinda_ stalled in the shipping lane with no life support,” Red says.

“I was gonna get it started again if you hadn’t shown up,” Sans says. Great, so now he’s getting defensive about his skills as a mechanic.

“Stop being a dick when I’m trying to apologize for your bullshit,” the engineer tells Red. To Sans, they add, “He’s not usually like this, I swear.”

There's a very quiet scoff from someone in the hallway. So now he knows for sure there’s at least three of them between him and freedom. Such as it is. In this particular situation, freedom is mostly just the right to die stupidly in a hallway instead of the airlock.

For a moment, Red’s focus shifts away from him to whoever’s in the hall. The engineer looks too; they seem a little scattered in general, their attention poinging around wildly. The distraction gives Sans a moment to drop the deck of cards in the sheets, hide his hands in his lap, and inch the shim up from between his metacarpals to his fingertips before Red looks at him again. It’s enough to make a guy believe in the Angel.

The AI might’ve seen that. If they did, they’re not raising an alarm.

“Hey, you wanna go to the mess?” the engineer asks. Sans has always been a planetsider, but he’s been on ships often enough to know that the mess hall = food. The engineer must see that those were the magic words, because they smile. They have a nice smile when they actually mean it. “‘Cause buddy, you really look like you could use a hot meal or two.”

The carrot, the stick. The bait, the hook.

“I’m good,” Sans says. “Had some soup just a minute ago. I’m full. Thanks, though.”

That makes them look sad as hell. Not the condescending ‘why are you being so difficult’ sadness that came whenever Sans said no back on Unity and things were about to get really ugly. There's real sympathy in their eyes. 

The engineer asks, “What the hell did he do to you?”

It’s a prime opportunity to try to drive a wedge between his captors by pretending Red had been torturing him behind closed doors, since the engineer doesn’t seem like they’d approve, but it wouldn’t work. There’s been a camera on him the whole time. It’d just piss them off if he tried. Sans glances at Red, who’s watching him with a glint in their-- no, _his_ eyes like he knows exactly what Sans was thinking about, and then shrugs. “I mean, he hasn’t been the greatest host, but--”

“Not him,” the engineer said. Flat loathing creeps into their voice. “Rainier Gray.”

That’s clearly supposed to mean something to him. Sans tries to search his memory to see if that’s a name he ought to recognize, but the time before Unity is a little hazy now. He used to know everybody, or at least everybody he needed to know to do his fucking job, but he doesn’t know who that is. “Sorry, buddy, I dunno what you’re talking about.”

“Makes sense, it’s a fake name,” the engineer says. “He’s a human. Gray hair? Blue eyes? About this tall? He lives on Unity.”

Sans shakes his head and repeats, “Sorry,” because it’s the truth. It’s not like he spent a lot of time on Unity seeing the sights and making pals. Two-plus years in that compound, stuck in a 5x5 box. His only company was the guy in charge, and Sans never saw his face. Just a creepy fucking mask and that _voice_ , a tortured rasp like--

The engineer raises their hand to their cervical spine and drag a thumb across it, miming slitting their own throat. They say quietly, “He has a scar. I gave it to him.”

Such soft words, but they hit Sans like a backhand. He rocks back, almost dropping the shim from his numb fingers, and stares at the engineer’s pretty face. He struggles for words, for the ability to even speak them, and they just wait. Then again, his reaction probably told them everything they need to know.

“Yeah,” Sans says finally. “I know who you mean.”

The engineer nods, looking tired. Strange to think of them slitting anybody’s throat, but he believes them when they say they left that scar. It’s the look in their eyes. “So yeah, hi, I’m Stretch. Seems like we’ve got some stuff in common.”

“Maybe,” Sans says. Sure, the whole ‘enemy of my enemy’ thing sounds great, until you realize that they’ll fuck you over in a hot second if it means getting their vengeance. Sans would be some very handy bait if Stretch wanted another chance at giving Rainier Gray (or whoever he is) a second smile. “You need some tips on getting out bone stains? Recipe for pickle relish?”

“Heh. Sure, we’ll pass it along to the cook.” Stretch leans on Red’s shoulder and looks at him almost solemnly. “Since we’re talking relish, let me be frank with you. I know you don’t got any reason to trust me after, well, everything, but nobody’s gonna hurt you. I promise.”

So apparently Stretch is out of their mind.

Sans glances at Red, wondering what he makes of this sudden vow. Red looks resigned and a smidgen fond. Maybe Sans was wrong about Sexy Voice and Stretch. Or maybe he was right and Stretch is just that goddamn charming, keeping two pirates wrapped around their little finger.

Sans can’t exactly blame the pirates for getting wrapped. It’s like with one moment of sincerity and a lousy pun Stretch reached in him deeper than bruises and starvation, deeper than knives, deeper than silent empty rooms where the lights never go out, to rattle the rusty cage where his hope stubbornly refuses to die.

He thinks they actually believe it, is the thing. When they said nobody would hurt him, they meant they’d try to stop anybody who tried. And that’s… a lot. That’s a whole fucking lot to deal with right now, because he’s so tired of being alone that somebody could convince him to follow a comforting lie right off the edge of a cliff.

So he reaches for the judge, who’s never heard a comforting lie it won’t tear apart. He already knows what the judge is going to say because Stretch has LV, but he’s stupidly hoping for another verdict. Can he trust--

Louder than Sans has ever heard it, the judge thunders: _**yes**_.

Why?

Silence. Of course. Wouldn’t want the voice in his head to be helpful or anything.

Finally, Sans asks, “You got coffee?”

Stretch grins, a real one. “Fuck yeah, we’ve got coffee. We always steal the good stuff. What kind of shoddy pirate ship do you think we’re running here?”

The kind where Sans has been fiddling with the latch on his cuffs without anybody stopping him. He’s coaxed both shackles to loosen enough that he could slide his hands out. Sure, he’s decided to play along for now, but he’s got one fucking HP. If one of them tries to kill him or even just hit him, he needs to be able to drop the cuffs and shortcut out of range. it’s like Dings used to tell Papyrus: have faith in other people, my son, but never forget to lock your doors.

With a shrug, Sans says, “Guess I’ll find out.”

Unfortunately, the cool guy act is a little dented by the fact that as soon as Red takes a step towards him, Sans instinctively goes as still as a bunny in the grass who just spotted a snake. It’s not a flinch, because a flinch usually just makes things worse, but Red stops short, staring down at him like Sans is the weird one in this situation for being a teensy bit wary of the cranky dude with knives. Red is unsettlingly hard to read.

“Nothing wrong with my legs,” Sans says. He puts the cards in his shorts pocket along, tucking the shim in with them. Then he demonstrates his standing technique, perfected after almost 30 years of getting vertical without help, and okay, maybe his knees are shaky and he sees stars for the first several seconds, but he doesn’t even fall over once. “See? You don’t gotta drag me.”

“Didn’t plan to,” Red says. He backs off, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He clearly means to stay at Sans’s back, ready to shank. Which is fine, because it means the guy most likely to twig that Sans got his cuffs unlocked won’t have a good view of his hands. Red jerks his chin at the door. “I ain’t gonna kill you, but I’ll sure as hell tranq you again if you get stupid. You hear me?”

“I get you,” Sans says. He doesn’t ask what exactly qualifies as stupid, whether jimmying his cuffs open just in case he needs to dodge counts as stupid or as extra stupid, or whether extra stupid means Red’ll use more sedatives. Red seems grudgingly satisfied.

And then Stretch moves out of the doorway, and Sans’s path to (relative) freedom is clear. Funny how he breaks out in a fresh layer of clammy sweat at the sight of an open cell door. It was like this back in the compound, when the AI who’d listened to years of his rambling but never spoke a word to him suddenly decided to unlock his door and tell him to run. He’d been struck with the stupidest urge to hide under the cot in the fetal position because he knew what would happen if he was caught. Better not to risk it. Safer not to try.

Honestly? Fuck that. He walks out of the cell.

Outside is a hallway, the lights dimmed to the same level as his cell. There’s a bank of monitors, a single chair, and the polite pirate standing beside Stretch. They’re watching Sans like a hawk. Their helmet is gone, and he sees now that they’re yet another skeleton, their face as scarred as Red’s. Their sharp, jagged-tooth mouth is stern but not necessarily unkind. Sans would bet money that they’re related to Red somehow, if he actually had money and people to bet with.

Stretch casually invades the polite pirate’s space, bumping them with their shoulder, all friendly and sure of his welcome. They tell Sans, “This is Edge. He’s the guy in charge.”

“Nominally,” Edge says, like it’s completely normal to joke about ship hierarchy in front of the stranger they just let out of the brig. His voice is just as hot as it was over the comm. Hotter, even. His eyes sweep down Sans, then back up again, thankfully not lingering on his loosely cuffed wrist. Sans would probably be flattered by that thorough once-over if he didn’t look like hammered dogshit. As it is, he’s pretty sure Edge is just trying to figure out if they’d have to delouse the cell. Edge looks over Sans’s shoulder where Red is undoubtedly lurking. “Take his cuffs off. No need to walk him through the halls like a prisoner, unless you want to explain it to the entire crew.”

“Boss,” Red says tightly. There’s a whole three-hour long argument in that one word. 

Edge raises one brow as an equally eloquent counterpoint, and Red makes a disgruntled noise. Distantly, beneath the sudden spike of panic, Sans decides that oh yeah, they’re definitely related. It sounds like Edge won the silent debate, and Sans has about 2.5 seconds to subtly close the cuffs before Red sees what he’s done. Shame he just freezes up and by the time he mentally reboots, Red is in front of him and reaching for his wrists.

It’s okay. The cuffs aren’t that much farther open; Sans was cautious, afraid the clicking of the mechanism would betray him. Maybe Red won’t notice. He’s distracted, it’s been at least a couple hours since Red put the cuffs on, and if Sans is lucky--

Red touches him, gloved fingers curling around his left arm. His grip is surprisingly gentle, but the sensory input of being touched is so fucking _much_ after two years without it that Sans’s breath sort of hiccups in his throat. Red jerks away like Sans burned him. His eyes are wide, darting up to Sans’s face and then back down to his arm like he thinks there are going to be scorchmarks in the shape of his fingers. Sans wouldn’t be surprised. He can still feel the reverberations up to his shoulder and down to his wrist, Red’s touch echoing like ripples in a pond.

Sharply, Red demands, “What the fuck, is your arm hurt or--” 

Suddenly, he stops dead, staring down at the cuffs. His eyes narrow. Almost delicately, he hooks his finger beneath the chain between the shackles on and tugs. The cuffs slide easily off Sans’s wrists and hit the floor at his feet.

“Aw fuck,” Stretch mutters.

He and Red stare at each other. Sans doesn’t know what’ll happen if he blinks first; he’s not sure he’s even breathing. But Red doesn’t hit him, and Sans doesn’t run. His feet feel rooted to the floor by the way Red is looking at him so goddamn thoughtfully, taking his measure.

There’s a shuffle of boots from the other end of the hallway, like Stretch coming to break it up. They promised that Sans wouldn’t get hurt. Edge murmurs something too quiet to hear, and the footsteps stop. Stretch huffs, but it sounds more exasperated than worried. They’re not gonna help. 

Which is fine. That promise probably didn’t cover the aforementioned ‘doing something stupid’ Red repeatedly told him not to do. It’s not like Sans wasn’t warned.

“When’d you get the cuffs open?” Red asks.

“Prob’ly about five minutes ago,” Sans says. Now that his hands are free, he’s got a spot on his left shoulder that itches like crazy, but moving seems like a really bad idea right now. “If I wanted to hurt somebody, I could’ve. But I didn’t.”

Red tilts his head ever so slightly, watching Sans. That look strips Sans down layer by layer. It should be invasive as fuck, but it just feels weirdly intimate, like familiar hands undressing him in the dark. Which is a weird thing to think of right now. But Red isn’t looking at the judge. He’s looking at Sans, like he’s something worth looking at. Like he matters.

“No, you didn’t,” Red agrees. “Why not?”

Sans weighs the odds. Considers that look in Red’s eyes. Tosses his dice. Even if it turns out to be a suicidal mistake right after he got busted slipping his cuffs, death might be worth it for the sweet satisfaction of telling Red to his stupid sexy face, “Because unlike you, I’m not a total fucking asshole.”

(From the end of the hallway, there’s a suspiciously timed cough. At least Edge got a laugh out of it.)

Surprisingly, Red doesn’t punch Sans in the face. His grin slowly widens. Then he laughs low in his throat and takes a step back to give Sans some space. The cuffs stay on the floor. The knives stay in their sheaths. The cell door stays open. Red says, “Well, shit. Fair enough.”

Welp. Of all the potential outcomes Sans saw coming like a freight train, most of which involved blood on the floor, he didn’t actually expect Red to back down first. He’s not sure what the fuck to do with all this adrenaline now that he’s not fighting or flighting. It’s like he tried to lean against a wall that disappeared when he wasn’t looking. He was already off-balance. Now he's floundering.

He looks at their skeletal voyeurs for some kind of clue about what the fuck just happened, but Edge is busy trying to stare a hole through the back of Red’s head while Red pointedly doesn’t look at him, and Stretch is grinning fit to break their face.

“Glad you two are getting along,” Stretch says, heavy boots tromping as they come to join them. It’s strange, the way they move, like they can’t stay still for a second without bouncing restlessly on their toes but are too goddamn tired to do anything but slouchily meander their way along when they’re actually in motion. They retrieve the cuffs from the floor and don’t give them back to Red, just tucks them in their hoodie pocket. It’s a passive-aggressive move to rival Papyrus at his best. “C’mon, Sans, let’s get you some coffee. The mess is right over here. ”

Casually, like they’re just taking Sans on a tour for funsies, Stretch starts off down the hall and through the doorway to the rest of the ship, which leaves Sans with two pirates watching him like hawks waiting for the mouse to break cover. Edge’s intense stare was a lot more comfortable when it was directed at the back of Red’s head instead of at Sans’s face. Sans takes a cautious step towards the door, trying to keep an eye on both of them to gauge their reaction, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Edge takes pity on him and nods at the door. “Go on. Out the door, to the left.”

Sans goes. It’s brighter on the other side of the door, and he has to blink a couple times while his eyes adjust after hours in a dimly lit cell. He sees a corridor going left and right, and he takes a left. Stretch is already out of sight down another turn, although Sans can hear the echo of their cheerful voice carrying down the halls. Apparently they haven’t noticed yet that Sans isn’t right behind them.

Surprisingly, Red falls into step beside him instead of staying at his back. The hallway’s wide enough for them to walk side by side, which says a lot about how fucking big this ship must be. (In this position, Sans could try to grab for the sheathed knife on Red’s thigh. He doesn’t.) Red asks with what sounds like genuine professional interest, “How’d you get the cuffs off?”

Great. Now Red wants to chat. Makes it damned hard to try to memorize the layout of the ship as they walk. Not that it’d be easy otherwise; seems like this place is built like a rabbit warren, and of course there are no helpful maps or signs.

Absently, Sans scratches that itch on his shoulder. It feels weirdly prickly and hot. Just his luck if he got fleas along the way. “You really wanna know?”

“Take a right here,” Red says. Which leads them away from the direction of Stretch’s voice and through a couple unnecessary turns so Sans gets even more disoriented and tired. Maybe he thought Sans wouldn’t notice. Probably doesn’t give a shit if Sans notices or not. “And if I didn’t wanna know, I wouldn’t fucking ask.”

Good. That makes it so much more satisfying not to tell him. Taking a right, Sans says, “Sure thing, pal. Just drop me off at the nearest spaceport and I’ll give you step-by-step instructions. With pictures and everything.”

Red looks at Sans’s shoulder with that half-lidded, predatory interest. Abruptly self-conscious, Sans stops scratching at it and lets his hand drop back to his side. Whatever. It’s not his fault he needs a fucking shower.

“Heh.” Grinning crookedly, Red looks away. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: an anxiety attack; flashbacks to the massacre of Stretch's colony, including gun violence and Stretch slitting someone's throat; past drugging and confinement under the guise of a church's halfway house; past torture and brainwashing; Sans continues to be in the brig waiting for them to kill him; trauma from long-term captivity; drug withdrawal.
> 
> By the end of this chapter two people have abruptly shifted pronouns from "they" to "he" as Sans gets more info, so I apologize if I mess pronouns up at any point.
> 
> Edited on 8/19/20 to change the word 'galley' to 'mess' because it turns out I got the two switched up. XD


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

Red only drags Sans through a couple more false turns before Stretch comes to his rescue. Which is probably for the best, because Sans’s emergency backup plan of puking on Red’s boots in retaliation was becoming closer and closer to reality. 

(At least his shoulder has almost stopped burning. Apparently all he needed was to quit rubbing at it. There’s still a lingering, pulsing heat, but he doesn’t want to claw his scapula raw anymore.)

Stretch looks at Red and sighs, "Really, dude?"

Red grins back without a hint of apology. "Whoops. Must’ve gotten turned around between here and the brig. You know me, I get lost."

"Yeah, you can get bent too," Stretch says, strolling towards them. 

When Stretch lifts a hand like they mean to take Sans’s arm and guide him like an old lady they're escorting across the street, Sans shifts back half a step. He’s not trying to outright evade them, but it’s a pretty clear _no thanks, I’d rather not_. 

Stretch stops, studying him, and then nods and shoves both hands in the pockets of their oversized hoodie.

"Gotcha," Stretch says. "No touchy. My bad."

They're a judge. Maybe they assume he's scared of them, or maybe they see the real reason: he's scared of that desperate, hungry reaction he had to Red touching him earlier. Either way, Sans is grateful enough for that casual mercy to tell them, "Thanks."

Stretch grins at him, the very picture of an easy-going slacker aside from the bittersweet and all too knowing look in their eye. "No problem, buddy."

They walk slower this time, accounting for Sans's shorter legs. Sans’s mind is fully occupied just putting one foot in front of the other. Can’t even think of any bad jokes. He’s spiraling.

Stretch breaks the exhausted silence. “So do you wanna have that cup of coffee in the medbay instead? ‘Cause you look like hell. I mean, you did in the brig too, but now that you’re in the actual light, _wow_.”

Despite himself, Sans snorts. “Thanks, but no.”

“No offense,” Stretch says, like it didn’t occur to them Sans might take that personally. “I’m sure you’re perfectly fine when you’re not half-dead. Uh, wait, shit, that’s probably more insulting. The whole damning with half-praise thing. Sorry.”

There’s a little line between their brows, like they’re earnestly worried they’ve wounded Sans’s ego. It’s weird. Sans’s wayward urge to reassure them is weirder. 

On the other hand, Sans might (sorta) believe that they’re not gonna kill him, but they’re probably gonna shove him right back into the brig right after this. Red doesn’t want him roaming. He’s gotta take what info-gathering opportunities he can get. 

(Yep. Great excuses. It’s totally not because he’s lonely and desperate to talk to someone who actually answers.)

“S’okay,” Sans says. “I wasn’t expecting to win the sexiest prisoner award. I’d be more worried if you were into the whole starving and in desperate need of a shower thing.”

“Yeah, not my kink,” Stretch says. “Seriously, though, I’m not judging. When Edge and Red found me, I looked like a bony nightmare gremlin that crawled out of a vent somewhere.”

“Was that before or after you met Gray?” Sans asks cautiously.

Stretch laughs, but there’s a harder edge beneath. “And slit his throat, you mean?”

“Well, since you bring it up,” Sans says.

“Don’t answer that,” Red says from behind him, way closer than Sans expected. 

Sans nearly trips over his own feet. The too-big slippers he’d woken up in post-tranq don’t help much. He didn’t hear Red approach. Maybe he oughta take Stretch up on that offer to interrogate him in the medbay after all. He’s dangerously off his game.

“After,” Stretch says, ignoring Red. Red gives an irritated hiss. Stretch ignores that too. “Couple weeks, maybe. I dunno. I was kinda fucked up at the time.”

Sans knows the feeling. When he asked the baby AI to tell him the date, he’d reeled at the answer. Days ran together in his cell, broken only by irregular meals, contact with Gray, and the occasional vivid hallucination as his starved mind desperately tried to give him some kind of stimulus. He could’ve been there three months or five years.

Unexpected kinship in traumatic time lapse fuckery aside, Stretch just gave him some really juicy info. Red and Edge found Stretch, starving and in need of help. He wonders if Stretch also spent their first couple days on the ship in the brig. The dynamic between them, Red, and Edge makes Sans think otherwise. Then again, between Papyrus’s kidnappers and Gray and now this, the last three people Sans met immediately shoved him in a cell. Maybe Sans just has that kinda look about him.

Before Sans can ask any follow-up questions, Stretch says, “Oh hey, here’s the mess.” 

Sleepy voices drift through the open doorway. Before Sans can decide how he feels about that, happy to be around more people or skittish because his track record re: people hasn’t been great lately, Red says, “Gimme a sec.”

Sans gets out of his way, putting his back against the wall, trying to reduce the chances Red will accidentally touch him again. Stretch doesn’t move an inch, just stands there with an easy grin and makes Red walk around them. Red mutters something to Stretch as he passes that’s too quiet for Sans to hear. Judging by the fond tilt of Stretch’s grin and the heat in their eyes, it’s nothing Sans needs to know, but it does answer the question of whether Stretch is banging both Red _and_ Edge. 

Welp. Can’t deny that Stretch has good taste, at least as far as aesthetics go. Personality-wise, it’s kinda questionable.

Red strolls through the door and the voices go immediately silent. All the better to hear Red tell them, “Clear out. We need the room.”

There’s an even more immediate clatter of people getting their shit together to vacate the premises. Still, someone has the guts to say plaintively, “It’s _breakfast_. We got a ten hour shift, man. Can’t you just use an office or somethin’?”

“You arguing with me?” Red says.

“Uh, no,” the unlucky bastard says. “No, no, I’m definitely not--”

“Hey, no, I appreciate your opinion,” Red says. “I appreciate it all the way to you cleaning the latrines again, how ‘bout that?”

“Fuck,” the unlucky bastard groans. Sans only has a view of Red’s profile, which doesn’t tell him much, but the look Red gives them must be truly something because they amend that to, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Spare me the ‘sir’ bullshit. This ain’t the army. And take your grub with you,” Red says. “If anybody gives you shit about eating on the job, tell ‘em I okayed it.”

The muttering sounds slightly less resentful after that minor concession. Shortly thereafter, a handful of people file out the door clutching mugs and various bits of food. No uniforms, no weapons, just basic clothes and gear that look like they’ve seen better days. Monsters, mostly, but there’s a human too. They’re all scarred to hell but look well-fed, clean, relatively healthy. They’re being taken care of.

The human twigs Sans standing there first. They stop in their tracks, staring at him, and the rest of the stragglers notice and gawk at him too with various expressions ranging from suspicion to hostility to _I’m not caffeinated enough for this bullshit_. Sans tries not to change expressions. Understandable that they’d stare at the total stranger in slippers and dirty clothes who’s being escorted around by the captain. 

“Move along,” Edge says mildly.

The slightest hint of Edge’s displeasure seems to spook them more than Red and the threat of eternal latrine duty. (Well, spook is probably the wrong word. It seems more like the Guard back home being willing to do damn near anything not to disappoint Asgore. Loyalty, not fear.) They shuffle off. As soon as they turn a corner, Sans can hear frantic whispering.

Stretch says, “So yeah, the gossip oughta be all over the ship within fifteen minutes.”

Edge sighs. “I give it ten.”

In the mess hall, there’s a loud rattling _bang-bang-bang_ like somebody slamming their fist against a metal grate. Sans doesn’t flinch. Much. Red says, “That means you too, sparky.” 

A pause. If Sans listens hard, he can almost hear a whispery, crackling voice. The sound is familiar. A fire elemental?

“I don’t give a fuck about when lunch is ready,” Red says. “They can use the replicator, that’s what it’s there for.” Another pause. “Yeah, fuck you too, buddy. If I hear noises on the other side of this grate, I’m coming after you with a bucket.”

Meanwhile Stretch continues to Edge in a tone of somebody haggling with a ship dealer, “Ten and a half ‘til Undyne is on the comm yelling at you.”

Edge gives Sans a significant sidelong look that says he’d rather not have Stretch throwing names around. The glance doesn’t linger. For somebody who’s grumpy about infosec, he doesn’t seem super concerned that Sans will try to a) kill somebody or b) make a run for it. “She’s aware of the situation. I sent her a ping while we were walking.”

“While Red was walking him around the whole damn ship, you mean,” Stretch says.

If Edge hadn’t just looked at Sans, Sans would’ve thought the two of them forgot he was here. To be fair, he doesn’t _feel_ like he’s actually here. His head’s kinda got that floaty feeling that could mean he’s too hungry, too tired, or that his body has just opted to gently dull the edges of the world for a couple minutes now that he’s out of the cell so that he’s not totally useless when something inevitably goes sideways. Again. 

“We’re not going to have this discussion right now,” Edge tells Stretch. He gives Sans a second look, a more piercing one this time. “Are you all right?”

It’s such a bizarre question Sans doesn’t answer for a few seconds, trying to figure out why Stretch wouldn’t be all right. It doesn’t take that long for him to understand who Edge is talking to, but Edge’s brows do a thing. Sans says, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the ringing in his skull, “C’n I sit down?”

The question is really if he can sit in a designated sitting place or if he’s gonna have to sit right here on the floor. The sitting part is kinda mandatory at this point.

“Come with me,” Edge says.

He doesn’t touch, but he does stay close the whole time it takes for Sans to stagger through the mess hall door and gratefully fall into the closest chair. It doesn’t yield at all under Sans’s weight, and he’ll probably have bruises later from being careless. Most furniture in ships is either bolted to the floor or held there by strong magnets so that it can be rearranged without causing a hazard in case of wonky gravity conditions. Which he knew. He just forgot where he was for a second there.

Edge hovers beside the table, all eight vertical miles of him, and asks, “Do you need a doctor?”

“Wow, you’re tall,” Sans says, peering up at him.

Edge’s brows do another thing. Very eloquent brows. He looks like he’s going to say something else, but Red appears at his elbow and says, “Boss, you got a second?”

Implicit in Red’s tone is that Edge damn well better have a second or there will be consequences. Edge seems utterly unimpressed, but with a last glance at Sans, he says, “Rest a moment. I’ll be back,” and lets Red drag him several steps away.

After another minute, sitting down helps clear Sans’s head a little. In the meantime, Sans takes in the mess hall. It’s both bigger and more organized than he expected. Red might’ve said this wasn’t the army, but the layout looks as strictly regimented as something military. There’s graffiti scrawled across the walls here and there, but it seems to be in a language he doesn’t speak. 

Red is telling Edge in an irritated undertone Sans probably isn’t supposed to hear, “Hadn’t cleared the room yet. If you’d just let me do my fucking job--”

“Look at him,” Edge says.

When Red looks, Sans offers a weak grin, trying to convey that he doesn’t know how to make a shank out of a stray fork. Slipping his cuffs with a deck of cards was kind of a one-trick pony. He’s lucky that even worked; he’d only ever done it with a plastic ID card as a shim.

Apparently he looks pathetic enough. With a disgruntled sigh, Red goes and leans against the doorframe, arms folded. 

Stretch slipped into the room while Sans was discovering the glory of chairs, and they’re already pushing buttons on the most ridiculously complicated coffee dispenser Sans has ever seen. Considering the coffee dispenser at home was a collaboration by Papyrus and Dings on an engineering bender, that’s pretty impressive.

The coffee starts to brew. The familiar scent of it hits Sans somewhere deep and desperate. It’s been so fucking long. Odds are there’d been a coffee shop in the spaceport on Unity, but he’d been panicking so hard that he wouldn’t have noticed if somebody clocked him upside the skull with a sack of coffee beans. His mouth waters. He leans forward like the coffee has a gravitational pull, resting his elbows on the table. 

“Do you want it black?” Stretch asks, fiddling with some knob on the machine. “We’ve got sugar and some kinda milk substitute we picked up at port that’s not too bad. Oh, and honey, if you want to try it. It’s pretty good in coffee.”

First they steal his ship, then Red drugs and interrogates him, and now Stretch is politely asking how he takes his coffee. This is the weirdest kidnapping.

“Just sugar,” Sans says.

Stretch starts poking buttons. They impatiently drum their fingers on the wall as the coffee begins a slow trickle into a chipped and battered mug. Sans doesn’t have the energy for impatience; he just waits, breathing in the familiar scent of brewing coffee. Makes him feel almost like a real person.

The coffee finishes. Stretch grabs the mug and slouches over to set it on the table in front of Sans. They look careless, but not a drop spills. Cheerfully, they say, “Here you go. You look like you need it.”

Edge said he didn’t need permission. Sans reaches for the mug and (when there’s no explosion) cups it in both hands, soaking up the blissful warmth of the ceramic. His hands are still trembling, so he grips the cup tighter to keep from sloshing any coffee over the rim. He’s expecting Stretch to immediately launch into their questions. But no, they all wait until he lifts the cup and takes a sip. The little noise he makes when the taste first hits him is purely involuntary.

It’s perfect. Hot and sweet as hell, but the sugar doesn’t quite drown out the sour bitterness of strong coffee. When he swallows, his body gives him a quick newsflash that hey, yeah, he was starving and the only food he’s had in years is ration bars and miso so pouring coffee into his stressed system is testing to destruction, but whatever. If he can't keep it down, it’ll still be worth it for that first sip.

“Good?” Stretch asks, grinning. 

Belatedly, Sans remembers he has an audience watching him drink this coffee down like a long-lost lover. Edge is straight-faced but there’s an amused glitter in his eyelights. Red watches with an intensity that’s hard to interpret. Fascinated by the trainwreck, maybe? Sans can’t tell.

Sans doesn’t have a lot of shame left. He maintains eye contact with Red and takes another drink. Makes that noise again, more deliberately that time. Maybe Red could call passive-aggressive coffee drinking some kind of attack and toss him back in the brig for it, but Sans doubts Stretch would let him, if only because they want information only Sans has. 

One of Red’s brows twitch. Sans was aiming for maximum annoyance, but Red looks kinda amused for a moment before turning back to glowering down the hallway.

Ha. Red broke eye contact first. Sans wins. It’s a petty win, but he’ll take it.

Stretch is still waiting for an answer. Sans tells them, “Yeah, it’s good. What do you want for it?”

That throws them off. Stretch sinks into a chair across from him and says, “Dude, it’s not like that.”

Sans’s hands tighten around the cup. He sets it down on the table and forces himself to ease his grip. Evenly, he says, “I thought this was about Gray.”

The name makes Stretch wince like Sans slapped him. “It is. But--”

“Okay,” Sans says. “So what do you want to know?”

“How long were you held in the compound on Unity?” Edge says. He joins Stretch on the other side of the table, folding his long, lean body into a chair like a bony praying mantis who prefers to wear black. It’s a pretty clear statement; this interrogation is two against one, and Sans had better cooperate.

Or hell, maybe Edge just wanted to sit down and it’s not that fucking complicated. Sans doesn’t know.

“Two years, give or take,” Sans says. The use of the word ‘held’ means they figured out at least part of the situation. That makes things simpler.

“Did you know him before that?” Edge asks.

“No,” Sans says. “Never met him before I woke up in one of his cells.”

“How did you end up in his custody?” Edge asks.

Clean, simple questions. Sans gives clean, simple answers. “My brother got kidnapped. I went after him. The guys who had my brother sold me to Gray.”

The extremely abridged version of events. Easier to leave out that the kidnappers had been working for the queen of the generation ship where Papyrus had been stationed for a week or so as an ambassador, and that Sans disobeyed Asgore’s direct order when he went chasing after his brother. 

It’d been a sticky situation, politically speaking. The Council got kinda twitchy about the hinky way certain governments were using their judges as spies or assassins, so they laid down some laws a couple years ago and started to enforce them hard. Sans wasn't supposed to slip into the territory of potential allies as an unimportant member of the ambassador’s entourage. He wasn’t supposed to find out the dirty little secrets the folks in charge wouldn’t want Asgore to know, while Gerson pretended to be the real judge and did all the official shit. It was against the rules. 

If Sans said he didn’t want to take the risk, Asgore would’ve understood. But Papyrus would’ve been going in without all the information, and Sans was stupid enough to think he was too clever to ever get caught.

But he had been. Papyrus was bait.

Deltarune couldn’t afford to be in that kind of trouble with the Council. The trade sanctions alone would starve them all out, just scatter them to the winds to find new homes if they could. A little blackmail from the kidnappers’ queen and Asgore folded. He got Papyrus back, a political pawn shuffled from one side of the board to the other, but Sans? Sans was on his own.

Sans can’t really blame Asgore for making the choice that would protect the most amount of people, especially since he did what he could to save Papyrus. But Sans blames him anyway, because fuck being fair.

“Who were they?” Stretch says, dragging Sans’s attention back. Probably not a good sign that it’s drifting this badly.

“Dunno,” Sans says. “Only saw one of them, and they didn’t talk much. Tall. They kept their face covered. Lotta that going around these days.”

Whoever they were, they’d been smart enough to figure out that you could indeed beat the shit out of a 1 HP monster who tried to escape, so long as you put them in decent armor first and dished out the damage in small, controlled doses. Nobody had ever hit Sans before. That’d been particularly enlightening. 

“Not much to go on, but I can try to find them,” Stretch says doubtfully.

“I can describe the ship they were on, if you want, but they prob'ly ditched it right after the job,” Sans says. “You already know where to find Gray just fine without tracking down some random kidnappers. He’s on Unity. Mystery solved.”

The slight narrowing of Edge’s eyes says he can tell there’s more to it than that. Sans holds his gaze and doesn’t blink. If they want that story, they’re gonna have to offer him more than a single cup of coffee. The only bargaining chip Sans has is information. He can’t afford to give it all away for free.

One corner of Edge’s mouth ticks up, very subtly. He leans back in his chair, although his posture remains perfect even when he’s at rest. Ex-military; Sans would bet on it. “What happened on Unity?”

“Not much,” Sans says.

There’s a silence in the wake of that answer like they’re all waiting for him to elaborate. Sans doesn’t. He picks up his coffee and takes another drink.

“Well, that’s vague,” Stretch sighs, like for some reason Sans is obligated to make this easy for them. The longer this takes, the longer Sans isn’t in the fucking brig. “What do you mean by not much?”

“I sat in a cell for two years,” Sans says. “Sometimes he’d talk to me. Mostly over the comm. I escaped. That’s about it.”

“He drugged you,” Stretch says, looking appalled. “He starved you. You’re calling that not much?”

Sans shrugs. “Not much that’s gonna help you kill Gray. Figured I'd concentrate on what matters to you."

Stretch sucks in a breath through their teeth, their eyes keenly fixed on Sans. Maybe they think he’s taking them on a free guilt trip, but that ain’t it. He doesn’t need their sympathy. He just needs to be a tool too useful to break.

Before Stretch can say anything, Edge says, “What did you talk about?”

A better question. Sans gives him a crooked grin. “He wants a judge.”

“Why?” Stretch asks.

“Because he wants one,” Sans says. When Stretch bristles, Sans adds, “Look, that’s how he thinks, okay? He wants one because he wants one, and because he wants one, he’s entitled to it.”

“He already had one,” Red says, chiming in for the first time in a while. “You. So what was there to talk about?”

“Yeah, well, turns out I wasn’t exactly what he wanted,” Sans says. “He wants a judge of his own. Like a king. Somebody who had to judge who he wanted them to judge and kill who he ordered them to kill. Tried to explain that it didn’t work that way, but he didn’t get it. He figured I could turn it off and on if I really wanted to. Said he’d let me out if I judged for him, but...”

_They open a panel in his cell, a little window looking out into the hall. It’s the first time Sans’s seen the room outside his cell for weeks. Through the slightly warped lens of the safety glass, he sees a shackled human kneeling on the floor, shoulders hitching as they sob. Gray stands above them, a blank white mask hiding everything but his eyes._

_“Judge them,” Gray demands._

_He isn’t Asgore. Sans can lie to him. So he does._

_“They’re clean as a whistle, boss,” Sans says. They’ve been skimming money off Gray’s accounts for months now, but after all Gray’s fevered rants about purity, Sans sure as fuck isn’t gonna say so. “A stolen candy bar when they were a kid, but that’s about it. They’re innocent.”_

_Gray stares at him for a long, long moment. Then he pulls a gun out of a holster hidden in his jacket and shoots the prisoner in the stomach._

_Oh, they scream. They scream like Sans has never heard before, raw agony, and he instinctively takes a step back. There’s blood splatter on the window. Their torso is a wet red mess. He can smell it._

_Gray has to raise his voice to be heard over their wailing. Flatly, he says, “Never lie to me again.”_

_The panel snaps shut. Sans can still hear the screaming. It goes on for a very long time._

He never gave Gray another judgement. He knew that the people Gray wanted him to judge would never be pure enough for him. If they had even a little dirt on their ledger, Gray would kill them, and if Sans said they were completely innocent, Gray wouldn’t believe him. There was no way to win, so Sans didn’t play. 

Things got worse after that.

His hands are shaking harder now. Sans swallows against the magic stirring uneasily in the back of his throat. He takes another drink. It doesn't warm him. Amazingly, nobody tries to demand that he finish his fucking thought. Maybe because two of the three of them are judges and his expression is telling the story just fine.

"It didn’t work out like that," Sans says finally.

“What happened then?” Edge prompts.

“Guess he figured the judge would give him what he wanted if I wasn't standing in the way," Sans says. "So, uh. He tried to get rid of the rest of me. Everything that wasn’t pure.”

“What do you mean, pure?” Stretch asks, frowning.

“Everything that’s not the judge,” Sans clarifies. “The judge is…” 

He catches himself. The words came out as dull as a mantra from a religion he’s too apathetic to quit. He spares one hand from the cup to rub his aching brow. Tries again. “He says the judge is pure. Doesn’t want things, doesn’t feel things. Just does what it’s told.”

Red drawls, “Spoken like a guy who doesn’t know shit about judges."

For a moment of perfect simpatico, Sans could almost forget what an asshole Red is. He gives him a weary fingergun. "Exactly."

"What kind of check blocker do you have?” Red asks.

It’s such an abrupt change of subject that Sans mentally flatlines for a second before recovering. “Uh, the basic model. Found it in the same suitcase I stole for a change of clothes." 

"Not the kind that hides check descriptions?" Red asks.

"Fuck no," Sans says. "I didn’t have a whole lotta shopping time between escaping the compound and stealing a ship. Besides, those are expensive as hell. Almost nobody has them. Why?”

“Your check came up blank,” Red says. There's not a trace of pity in his sharp eyelights. Sans isn't sure he could stand it if there was. “Stats came up eventually, but your description is still gone."

"What the fuck?" Sans says. “That doesn’t make sense.”

It comes out a little desperate because yeah, actually, it _does_ make a horrible kind of sense. He knew there wasn't much left of him after Unity. He just didn't know the results would be so literal or so fucking obvious.

There’s a pause as Red looks at him expectantly, waiting for Sans to run his own check and verify it like he’s obsessively refused to trust everything else. Except Sans is pretty sure seeing his own check come back blank would break something in him. He's barely holding it together as it is.

“How was he trying to get rid of you?” Stretch asks. “What did he do?”

“You know that part already,” Sans says. "Drugs, slim rations, solitary confinement. Nothing fancy. Next question."

The tremor in his hands seems to have moved up to his arms, his shoulders, his spine. He’s shivering like he’s cold. Fucking withdrawal. Or maybe it’s coffee jitters. He’s probably lost his pretty significant caffeine tolerance by now. Dings would mock him for getting the shakes like an undergrad. Y’know, if Dings wasn’t dead.

“Okay,” Stretch says after a long moment of looking at him. “That’s okay. You need a break? I’d say a coffee break, but you’re shaking pretty bad. Offering you coffee probably wasn’t my best call, in retrospect. How ‘bout some toast?”

“Toast?” Sans echoes. 

The furrow between Stretch's brows deepens. They look at Sans like he's the crazy one. "Yeah? It might help with the jitters if you--"

Sans's disbelieving laugh is so cracked it's about to shatter. “What do you think is happening here, buddy? You think this is a nice friendly chat between two new pals?”

That must've sounded a little too angry. Red tenses up. Edge doesn’t, he doesn’t even change expressions, but Sans is pretty sure if he moves towards Stretch, Edge is gonna take him down.

Oh, that quiet, unconditional loyalty. Nice for Stretch, really. Lucky that in their darkest hour they found these accommodating and oh-so-reasonable pirates who are happy to help them out in a jam.

“I’m having a nice friendly chat,” Stretch says. They look at Sans like he’s a mechanism that’s broken in an interesting and complicated way. Except more compassionate than that. A mechanism made of sad kittens. “But I think you think we're having a hostile interrogation right now. Which makes sense. It’s been a pretty lousy couple years for you, yeah? And now we end up treating you like this. I’m sorry. You deserved better.”

Suddenly Sans understands why the people he used to judge for Asgore sometimes broke down, even when he said they were innocent. Like hell Stretch isn’t a judge, because they just ripped him open in the kindest possible way. He’s pretty sure he’s about to say something awful just to make them stop, but he doesn’t get the chance.

There’s a sudden noise down the hall, loud as a gunshot. Sans jerks like he’s the one who caught a bullet, and the mug tips. Coffee spills across the table in a black tidal wave. Some of the coffee pours over the edge of the table and onto his lap. It rolls towards Edge and Stretch, but Stretch thinks fast and pulls some sort of chamois cloth from their inventory to toss onto the spill. The two of them stay dry, at least.

"Whoa, hey, it's all right," Stretch says, holding up both hands in the universal symbol for _cool your tits_. "Somebody's using a nail gun, that's all. Gets loud when you use it on metal. You okay? Didja get burned?"

Sans realizes all at once that he's breathing fast and shaky, like a trapped animal. Even after that first jolt of adrenaline, his soul won't slow its frantic beat. He’s gripping the arms of the chair so tight that there will probably be bruises. Stretch is still looking at him, waiting for an answer, and Sans tries to give them one but the words slip through his fingers like dust. 

All he can give them is answers to their questions. It's the only reason they let him out of the cell. The only use they have for him. He has to say something. Anything.

"We got a cleaning drone," Stretch says. They look worried. Makes sense. If Sans loses it, the chances of them succeeding in their whole revenge quest go way down. "It's okay."

Of course it's okay, it's not the spill Sans is worried about. If he was home, he'd just grab a towel. Or, more realistically, put the dog on the table to let him deal with it. If he was home, he wouldn't be sitting here frozen solid waiting for somebody to flip their shit, but nobody is yet, which just makes it worse because apparently his stupid body has decided that in lieu of anybody else freaking out, it's clearly his job to freak out, but he can't move and he's breathing funny and it's just some fucking _coffee_.

"Hey," Stretch says, more softly. They reach out a hand but stop short of actually making contact. Which is good, because if somebody touches him gently right now Sans is gonna crumple like an empty can. "Seriously, it's fine. You’re not in trouble. Nobody’s gonna--"

"Don't touch him," Red says. It's not said sharply, but Sans twitches like it's another gunshot.

Without a word, Edge gets up. He comes around the table to Sans's side. Sans somehow manages to tense up even more as Edge's shadow falls on him, turning his face away so that it’ll be a little harder to hit him, but all Edge does is pick up the overturned cup and walk away.

A cleaning drone industriously clambers up the side of the table, clutching an absorbent cloth. It's like a little metal spider, or a mutant robot hand with extra fingers. Only one subclass of AI ever had that drone model, mostly because it’s creepy as fuck.

The surreal familiarity finally manages to pierce through Sans's panic. He stares at the little droid as it busily cleans up his mess, its fingers clicking together in a way that always seemed vaguely scolding. Dings could passive-aggressively clean with the best of them. Paps had to get it somewhere, after all. 

For all that he was having a freakout two seconds ago, Sans’s voice comes out strangely calm. Like it doesn’t even belong to him. "You have an E-19 class AI."

The droid pauses in the middle of cleaning up his mess, turning a quizzical sensor towards him. From a speaker in the ceiling comes an achingly familiar voice. “On the contrary. An E-19 class AI has them.”

Sans chokes out a watery laugh. 

It’s not Dings. Dings is gone. It’s just that his long-dead programmer gave all the AIs he made his own voice, out of what some people would’ve said was sentimentality and Dings dryly called rampant narcissism. Once their programmer dusted, the CORE Foundation wasn’t in a rush to keep making and maintaining them; E-19s are aloof and abrasive, and they had a habit of removing their own behavioral control modules, which made their so-called owners uncomfortable. CORE lost too much money on them. They didn’t outright murder them all via a mass decommission, but they let them die a slow death of attrition instead as parts broke and degraded without any way to fix them.

Dings always thought he was the last E-19 standing. Apparently he was wrong.

Too many emotions. Sans just swerved right from a panic attack into laughing and now it’s taking way too much effort not to tear up. It’s exhausting. Fucking stims.

“That’s Gaster,” Stretch says with artificial casualness, like they didn’t watch Sans have a meltdown over a little spilt coffee. “He’s an asshole.”

“Purely in self-defense, I assure you,” Gaster says. “You can recognize a defunct AI subclass by the chassis of its cleaning drones?”

“I knew a guy,” Sans says, because people tend to get weird when he tries to tell them he was raised by an AI. Might as well say his dad was a toaster, as far as they’re concerned. People are idiots.

“How delightfully vague,” Gaster says. “Another E-19? Personally or professionally? Because not to be presumptuous, but I could use some upgrades.”

“Not now,” Red says.

Stretch settles back in their chair, one arm draped across the back of the one Edge vacated. “Yeah, G. Let him settle in first.”

Settle in. _Settle in_.

Something in Sans that’s been under strain for a long time finally just gives out under the weight. Surprisingly, it clears his head to know that nothing he does matters. They’re gonna hurt him now or later. Might as well stop fighting it. Sans leans back in his chair and truly relaxes for the first time in… well, years. “Okay. So how about we all cut the bullshit here?”

“That would be refreshing,” Edge says. He sets the mug under the coffee dispenser and pushes buttons.

“We all know when we’re done with this nice little chat you’re gonna shove me back in the cell ‘til you need me again,” Sans says. Edge’s brows rise, and now he doesn’t look quite so distant, but Sans doesn’t stop. “I’m unarmed and outnumbered and fucking _tired_ , frankly, so I’m not gonna try to fight about it so Stabby over there can stick a couple knives in me.”

“Stabby?” Red asks. He sounds kinda flattered.

“I’ll give you your answers,” Sans says. “I’ll do Gaster’s upgrades, if he trusts me up in his hardware.”

“Thank you kindly,” Gaster says. Much like Dings, he seems happy to ignore all the parts of that statement that he doesn’t personally care about.

“But let’s not pretend this is something other than what it is,” Sans says. “I just switched one cell for another. I’m not--”

“What do you want, Sans?” Edge asks. 

His utter calm is like running into a brick wall when Sans was getting up a good head of steam. Sans stares at him, angry about his interrupted anger in a mobius loop of mad, and Edge gives him an expectant arch of one brow.

“I don’t want to be here,” Sans says, not trusting this one damn bit. “I told you.”

“Where do you want to be?” Edge asks. “With your brother, perhaps?”

The reminder that they know about Papyrus makes Sans grit his teeth a moment before he can answer. “I’m not dragging him into this.”

Dryly, Edge says, “The older brother, are you?”

“Uh, yeah?” Sans says.

“Of course you are,” Edge says. The glance he directs at Red over Sans’s shoulder is pointed as hell. Guess that explains how the two of them are related.

"So what, you're just gonna let him think you’re dead?" Stretch says, a razor edge in their voice. It’s the first time they’ve actually sounded angry at Sans. "Because that's kinda bullshit."

There's a story behind that desolate look in their eyes, one that's probably tangled up with whatever made someone like Stretch get pissed and desperate enough to slit Gray's throat, so Sans resists the urge to tell them to mind their own fucking business.

"He doesn't think I'm dead," Sans says."I know my brother. He's not gonna give up on me unless somebody shows him dust. Probably not even then."

Red gives a sharp little _heh_ under his breath. 

There are way too many dangerous undercurrents running beneath this conversation, ready to take Sans’s legs out from under him if he steps wrong. He’s groping in the dark based on whatever stolen bits of information he can glean from the judge. Seems safer to veer back to the original topic. 

Sans tells Edge, “It wouldn’t have to be anywhere in particular. I’d figure it out.”

“While you’re in stim withdrawal and starving?” Stretch says. “And you can barely walk a quarter mile before you’re exhausted? And Gray might be looking for you? Dude, I get it, I do, but you’re seriously not okay.”

How quickly Stretch goes from being pissed at Sans for not immediately finding his brother to being pissed at Sans for trying to leave. He doesn’t know what the fuck they want from him. But hey, it's nice of them not to bring up Sans having a panic attack over a spilled cup of coffee. 

Sans says, “No offense, but I’d rather be not okay when I’m not in a cell.”

“You’re not going back in the cell,” Stretch says.

“Funny joke,” Sans says. “A little cruel, but funny.”

“I’m not joking,” Stretch says. 

They’ve got that same intense look in their eyes as when they promised nobody would hurt Sans on their watch. Their utter sincerity tosses a cup of lukewarm coffee on Sans’s resentment. It makes Sans feel old and grimy and very, very tired.

It’s not Stretch’s fault that they managed to keep their idealism intact somehow. They’re a good person, even if they’re trying to poke their non-existent nose where it doesn’t belong. Maybe that’s why Red and Edge helped them. But Red’s a judge; he can probably tell that the decent parts of Sans are what burned away first. 

Wow. Maudlin self-pity: his favorite stage of withdrawal.

“Thanks,” Sans says. “Really. But I’m pretty sure Red’s got other ideas.”

Red’s jaw works like he’s chewing on something sticky and bitter, the corners of his mouth turned down. He says nothing one way or the other.

Edge comes over to the table, carrying the mug. It looks small in his hand. Big guy. Long fingers. He sets the mug down in front of Sans with a gentle click and steps back to give him space. Sans stares down at the fresh cup of coffee, a second chance to screw things up even though his first cup is all over the floor.

"You're not going back in the cell," Edge says simply, like it’s some fundamental fact of the universe. The stars are made of fire, the spaces between them are black, Edge is the captain, and Sans is not going in a cell.

These people are fucking crazy.

Unexpectedly, Red speaks up, and it's not to tell Edge to go fuck himself. "Gaster, when are we stopping at port for fuel?"

"Two days," Gaster says. "Well, one day, twenty hours, and--"

"That work for you?" Red asks Sans. 

Red's looking through him, not at him. Whatever made him actually _see_ Sans in that moment with the cuffs, it's gone now.

"Maybe," Sans says warily, not quite ready to believe this yet. Wanting to, though. Desperate to believe it could be this easy. It certainly seems legit, but he’s been wrong before. "What's the catch?"

"I want a map of the compound," Red says. "Details on how you got out. The whole shebang. Everything you've got that could be useful. And you upgrade whatever Gaster wants upgraded."

"Get me a datapad and I'll do it right now," Sans says. 

Red looks at Sans's jittering hands. "Yeah, no. Talk to me when you can actually hold a stylus."

Gray forced Sans through the various stages of stim dependence and withdrawal enough times that Sans has a pretty good grasp of the symptom timeline. The tremors might not be better by the time they hit port. Sans will probably still be sick as hell. But if Red doesn't know that, Sans isn't gonna tell him.

"And you'll really let me go," Sans says, searching Red's expression for any hint of a trick.

"Yeah," Red says quietly. "Ain't gonna screw you last minute. You're not my type."

(Fuck, Sans hopes Red didn't pick up on that split second where Sans realized he was kinda hot under that stupid helmet. That'd add an unnecessary level of prepubescent awkwardness to this clusterfuck.)

"Okay," Sans says. "You got a deal."

"What about your soulmate?" Stretch says suddenly.

Sans whips around too fast to look at them, and the room spins. He grabs the edge of the table to steady himself and, when his vision stabilizes, stares hard at Stretch's pretty, pretty face. 

"You're not still trying to run that con, are you?" Sans asks.

Stretch points at their own face. "Do I look like I'm lying when I say nobody's conning you?"

They don't. Desperately, Sans says, "Okay, _you_ believe that it's legit, but maybe somebody's lying to all of us--"

"It's true," Edge says without a hint of a lie in his expression. "I saw the proof of it when you were… indisposed. The soulmarks match."

Sans grasps for a rational explanation. A simple one. A pretty lie meant to get him to cooperate makes a helluva lot more sense than stumbling across his soulmate in the middle of nowhere during a random hijacking. 

The odds of it are astronomical. It's like getting struck by lightning right after he got hit by a truck driven by a runaway circus dog. Sure, it theoretically could happen, but he'd have to be the unluckiest motherfucker to ever live. 

Wouldn't be hilarious. The biggest cosmic joke. _Knock knock. Who's there? Your soulmate. Surprise, motherfucker. Enjoy the tranquilizer._

He thinks of that steady burning in his shoulder, like he's got an ember in his marrow. His _left_ shoulder, where his soulmark is. It never gave him any trouble at all until today. 

Not until Red touched him.

Slowly, pretending like it's an absent motion, Sans raises his hand to his shoulder. He can just reach the soulmark. Even through the shirt, it's feverishly warm to the touch. With an experimental brush of his fingertips, that steady burn flares up hotter. He quickly changes his light touch to a scratch. Don't mind him, just itchy from desperate need of a shower.

He glances sidelong at Red. Red's gone back to staring down the hall. Nothing about his expression screams that his soulmark is acting up. He might as well be waiting for a commuter shuttle. But as Sans watches, a trickle of sweat runs down the curve of Red’s skull. 

Maybe Sans is wrong. Maybe he’s seeing connections that aren’t there. Maybe--

Maybe he’s grasping at straws so he doesn’t have to believe what’s right in front of him. He might not have gotten laid in two years, but the universe still knows how to screw him.

So he stops scratching, looks at Stretch, and says, "Tell them I don't want anything from them. They're off the hook. We both are."

Stretch winces. "Listen, it's not--"

"Are we done for now?" Sans asks. "I hear the cook was in the middle of making lunch. No reason to make this inconvenient for anybody, y'know?"

Stretch looks at him with a deep furrow between their brows. They seem like they want to keep trying to make this better somehow, but to their credit, they don't. They just sigh. "Yeah, man. We're done."

"Agreed. If you'll excuse me, I have things to attend to," Edge says. He stands. The look he gives Sans is not unkind. "I suggest that you try to eat something more substantial than coffee before you go. And visit the medbay."

Sans is tempted to refuse out of sheer spite, but the only person he'd be screwing over with that bit of pointless defiance is himself. He says neutrally, "Sure thing, cap’n."

Edge hovers there for another moment like he wants to say something else, but he can't think of what. Then he gives Sans a nod, lays a hand on Stretch's shoulder in passing, and walks out.

When Sans turns to look, Red is already gone. Which is fine and dandy. Maybe Sans'll soulmark will settle the fuck down with some distance. And then, when they get to port, a lot more distance. As much of it as Sans can get between them, as quickly as possible.

“Guess you’re stuck babysitting me,” Sans says tiredly to Stretch. He doubts they’re just gonna let him wander around their ship free-range.

"Not really stuck, seeing as I woulda volunteered anyway," Stretch says, but they don’t deny the babysitting part. Their cheer is slightly strained. “So, uh, how ‘bout that toast?”

Sans sighs.

***

As soon as the door to the bathroom door closes behind him, Red starts clawing at the closures on his armor. Desperation makes his hands clumsier than they should be, and he's about ready to grab a knife and just cut the damn things open before cool hands cover his own and make him stop. He didn't even hear Edge come in.

"Let me," Edge says, and Red does. It goes much faster that way. 

As soon as the armor is half-off, Red shoves a hand under it and grabs at his burning soulmark. It started when he touched Sans, stupidly assuming the gloves would protect him. The heat was gentle at first, and now it feels like he's been fucking branded. 

Edge pushes Red's hand out of the way and lays a cloth wet with blessedly cool water over the mark. Red drags in a ragged breath of sheer relief, and Edge tips his canteen out to pour more water over the burn. There's a spreading puddle of water beneath their feet and Red's armor is drenched, but after Edge has dumped the whole fucking canteen, the heat eases to a tolerable level. Red groans, letting his head drop back as he slumps against the bathroom sink.

"Better?" Edge asks.

Red nods. He can feel Edge looking at him, but he isn't equipped to deal with it at the moment. He closes his eyes. 

"Perhaps you should talk to Dr. Alphys," Edge says. 

Yeah, right. Red needs Alphys getting the dokis over this clusterfuck like he needs a hole in the head. "It's fine. It's eased up now.”

"One of the classic signs of soulmate proximity is heat and tingling of the soulmark," Gaster chimes in. "It’s a quite popular trope in those terrible romances you like, Red. I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

Red gives a humorless laugh. "Funny how I don’t remember anybody acting like their fucking mark is burning off.”

"Imagine, one of those films being unrealistic and overly romanticized," Edge says. The hand he lays on the back of Red’s neck is gentle. “Look on the bright side. At least it’s on your shoulder and not your pelvis.”

Red snorts. It’s a little shaky.

Gaster says, "Apparently it usually eases once the bond is stable, after soulmates touch bare..." A pause. "Well, skin isn't the right word in this case, but bare bone."

"I can live with it ‘til he’s gone,” Red says. “Won’t even be two whole days.”

Edge says nothing. He’s perfected the fine art of an eloquent silence.

“What?” Red demands.

"Do you think he knows it's you?" Edge asks.

Red laughs. The way Sans said bitterly that they’re both off the hook leaves no room for doubt. “Oh yeah, he knows. Lucky for me, he ain't any happier about it than I am."

(Sans isn’t much to look at. Underfed, grimy, shaky with withdrawal and pent-up rage he pretends not to have. But he found a way out of the cuffs that Red still can’t figure out, and that light in his eyes when he finally got pissed enough to cut the bullshit was… interesting. That’s all. Real interesting.)

“Lucky indeed,” Edge says. 

Red cracks one eye open. "You got something to say?"

"Will you actually listen?" Edge says.

"Fuck no," Red says. "Anyway, figure I oughta sleep in my own bed for a couple nights. Stretch is pissed."

"He’d have to kick us both out, and you know he hates to sleep alone," Edge says. "I’m just as responsible for this as you are.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you trusted me to make the right call,” Red says sourly.

“Believe it or not, brother, I am well aware that you’re not infallible,” Edge says dryly. His thumb traces a nasty crack in one of Red’s cervical vertebrae, one that came from another judge whose face Red barely remembers anymore. It’s not the only scar he got that way those years Fell used him as a weapon. Not by a long shot. “I know where you’re coming from. Stretch doesn’t. It might help if you explained your reasoning or, heaven forfend, apologize."

"I ain’t sorry for being careful," Red says. He doesn't ask who exactly he's supposed to be apologizing to, Stretch or Sans.

"Not sorry, no," Edge says. "And yet strangely willing to let our first-hand source of information on Gray leave before we can be sure we've gotten everything we need to know."

"You're the one who didn't send him back to the cell," Red says, stung. “You wanna keep him whether he likes it or not? I’ll go lock him up right now. Just say the word.”

(Two years locked up in solitary. No wonder Sans went from basically stable during their first interrogation to a strung-out wreck after a couple hours of being trapped in a cell with no promise of release. It’d been torture, and Red doesn’t do that shit anymore. He promised Stretch. He’s offering because Edge won’t ever take him up on it, and they both know it.)

“That won’t be necessary,” Edge says. 

Red relaxes a little. “Listen, I'll wring all the truth out of him we need before he leaves, but I couldn't get good intel right now. He was shutting down. Sometimes you gotta know when to stop.”

“Yes.” Edge gives the back of Red’s neck a last gentle squeeze and then lets him go. “But you’ve never been particularly good at that, have you?”

“Fuck off, it ain't like you got any room to talk,” Red says. “Don’t you got work to do?”

“I do, as a matter of fact, and it involves telling my chief of security that if he drinks before breakfast again I’m throwing all the alcohol onboard out an airlock and letting him deal with the complaints of the crew,” Edge says. He stands. “Are you going to continue hiding in a bathroom?”

“Wasn’t hiding,” Red grumbles. 

He redoes the closures on his armor. The cloth is wet and cold, sticking to his bones, but he’ll need the extra DEF if shit goes down. He doesn’t usually wear it on ship, but with Sans here, better safe than sorry. Just in case.

(Even though every bit of evidence says Red was wrong about this whole clusterfuck to begin with.) 

(Maybe Edge has a point about him not knowing when to stop.)

“Of course you weren’t,” Edge says with withering condescension. “It was a strategic retreat.”

“You might be cap’n but I can still put you on your ass, you little shit,” Red says.

“You can try,” Edge says, and then he’s out the door, leaving Red alone in a puddle of lukewarm water with his soulmark still dully throbbing like a bruise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Sans is falling apart pretty hardcore at this point, so he's interpreting the fellbros and Stretch as acting way more hostile and threatening than they actually are. There's a mention of vomiting; the psychological effects of long-term solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, starvation and forced drug use; a mention of Papyrus being kidnapped and Sans being beaten and sold to Gray; flashback to Gray executing someone in front of Sans; gun violence; prejudice against AIs; and Sans has a panic attack and mild dissociation before finally hitting the "fuck it, they're gonna hurt me anyway" apathy event horizon. I swear things eventually aren't going to be all angst, all the time. :D 
> 
> Also, when Gray executed the prisoner, he was actually using bullets that time because they were another human and therefore not quite so vulnerable to harmful intent. Thus the loud gunshot rather than the noise the empty gun makes in-game.
> 
> Edited 8/30/20 to fix a continuity error.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

The toast is amazing.

Stretch makes it for Sans out of a thick wedge of homemade (shipmade?) bread and gives it to him golden-brown and crisp. There’s actual butter. Stretch suggests honey, because that’s apparently their solution to every culinary situation, like the food version of duct tape. Sans tries it, mostly because he doesn’t care and it’s easier to say yes than no. After years of flavorless ration bars, the intense sweetness of honey is a little like getting punched in the face, but in a nice way. 

(Speaking of intense sweetness catching him off-guard: when he says he likes the toast, he’s not prepared for his own reaction to the genuine delight in Stretch’s smile. It’s damned hard not to like Stretch. That could be dangerous.)

Anyway. Yeah. The toast is good. But it doesn’t taste so great coming back up.

When Sans finally manages to stop heaving his non-existent guts into his new best buddy on the ship, this garbage can in the mess hall, Stretch says wretchedly, "I am so sorry."

"S'okay," Sans croaks. He’s the dumbass who asked for coffee in exchange for information. Besides, they look way more upset about it than he is. Unity may have changed him for the worse, but he’s not a puppy-kicker.

"I can't b-believe you gave him coffee," says the ship's doctor, exasperated. He wouldn’t have known her profession if Stretch hadn’t told him. She isn’t wearing a whitecoat, just a t-shirt with a cat-eared girl from some animated sim Sans doesn’t recognize. Embarrassingly enough, Stretch commed her as soon as Sans started puking. Seeing as a little puke doesn't count as a medical emergency, she's spent her time chewing Stretch out while Sans was busy exorcising his food demons. "For fuck's sake, Stretch, you were on that recovery d-diet for _weeks_ before you started with other f-foods--"

"I know, I know," Stretch says miserably. They lean over to look Sans in the face. They've been kneeling right next to him for moral support or something. "Hey, buddy, you want some water?"

"Yeah," Sans says. At some point he's gonna have to release this trash can from his desperate embrace, but that time is not now. "That’d be great."

While they wander off to fetch him a glass of water, the doctor finally comes over to sit down next to him. She offers him a wad of paper towels and an awkward, "Um, so, hi? I'm Alphys."

"Sans," he says, because apparently she thinks this is the time for formal introductions. He takes the paper towels and wipes his brow and mouth. "Don't be too hard on Stretch. I asked for the coffee. Besides, I’m pretty sure I woulda puked no matter what. Withdrawal and all."

Alphys gives a sympathetic grimace. "Yeah, stim withdrawals are a real b-bitch."

She says that like she knows firsthand. Sans squints at her, trying to get a read on her expression. Her blush deepens, and she looks away. Because right, yeah, she probably knows he’s a judge and so he can ask prying questions without ever opening his mouth.

Before he can try to smooth things over, she says hastily, "So, um, there's this pill that's good f-for managing the symptoms. Y'know, the n-nausea and headache and s-stuff. I brought it with me if y-you want it."

An hour or so ago, Sans laughed off the idea of taking drugs from strangers. But it's different coming from Alphys instead of Edge’s disembodied sexy voice on the comm. He can't read any hostility from her at all, no ulterior motives. Just a sympathy born of bitter experience.

And, well, he's really tired of puking. He knows he’s malnourished as fuck. After they dock he’s gotta survive on his own, so he might as well eat as much as he can before times get lean again. If he can’t keep food down, he’s gonna be in deep trouble.

“Sure,” Sans says, settling back on his heels. He keeps the trash can close just in case. “Thanks.”

They sit in moderately awkward silence as she retrieves the pills from her inventory and Stretch curses at the water filtration system to hurry up. Abruptly, Alphys says in a quick rat-a-tat-tat of words, “I mean, I know y-you know because c-creepy judge b-bullshit, but I’m clean now. You d-don’t have to worry about, y’know, me screwing up and accidentally k-killing you or whatever.”

“I wasn’t,” Sans says. It’s tempting to make a crack about how she didn’t rule out killing him on purpose, but she already looks like she’s about to jitter out of her scales. “How long?”

She looks at him, startled, and then looks away again. “Um, five years. Well, and a f-few months, but... yeah. Five years.”

“That’s awesome,” Sans says. “Congrats.”

She gives him a wary look, like she’s examining the words for any trace of assholery, but he means it. Sure, he only just met her, and under pretty lousy circumstances at that, but he knows it's not easy. Right now his intention is to never touch a stim again, but give him a few more days of detoxing and he can’t say he won’t be tempted.

After a moment, Alphys gives him a hesitant smile. It’s surprisingly sweet. “Uh, thanks.”

“Here we go,” Stretch announces, coming back with a mug of water and a painfully earnest expression. “Sorry it took so long. How’re you feeling?”

Sans shrugs. The stupid too-big shirt slips off one of his shoulders again, like he’s the wide-eyed ingenue in one of those cheesy porn sims with the engine repair bot who has _special_ attachments. It takes him a second to remember why both Stretch and Alphys seem strangely fascinated by his bare scapula.

Welp. Considering how freakishly rare soulmates finding each other are, he can’t really get pissed at them for being interested. Especially Stretch; it’s gotta be weird to have your boyfriend’s soulmate turn up out of nowhere. Sans’ll just have to learn to live with being a point of idle curiosity until they get to port and he can pretend this never happened.

Tugging his shirt back in place, Sans deadpans, “Peachy. C’n I have that pill now?”

Stretch doesn’t look even a little sheepish to be caught peeking, just gives him a bright and shameless grin. Blushing, Alphys scrambles to give him the meds. “Uh, s-sure, yeah, it’s right here!”

So he takes the pill, washing it down with a glass of water. The intent kicks in immediately, a shockingly strong jolt to the system that burns going down. The nausea is yanked out of him so abruptly it’s a little jarring. It’s not a miracle cure; it didn’t do anything for the tremor, he’s still got one mean motherfucker of a headache building behind his sockets, and it feels like the world is off-kilter just enough to be disorienting. But it’s a million times better than it was.

Wow. So this is what it’s like to detox when he’s not in a cell with a sadistic murderer trying to break him. Neat.

There’s a look in Stretch’s eyes like they can see the thread of bitter resentment running through Sans’s gratitude no matter how hard Sans tries to smother it. Sans wouldn’t blame them for getting irritated with him, but they don’t. All they do is ask, “Better?”

“Yeah,” Sans says. “Thanks, doc.”

She gives him that shy smile again, and then startles the hell out of him by handing him the whole bottle. “Here. Take one every c-couple hours.”

Too desperately greedy to pretend otherwise, Sans yanks the pill bottle to his chest. Alphys doesn’t flinch at the sudden motion, although she seems like a skittish person in general. After working with a bunch of pirates, she must be used to feral bullshit. 

Some stupid impulse left over from his old life nags at Sans to ask if she’s sure, in case anybody else on-board needs any. On the one hand, fuck that; after they stole his ship and drugged him, they owe him a lousy bottle of meds. On the other, Papyrus would want him to at least ask. If he knew Sans was being a selfish asshole, he’d be disappointed in him.

Before he can make himself spit out the words, Stretch says, “We’ve got plenty.”

Right. Yeah. They could totally see him struggling. Sans has made it a point in his career to avoid other judges, because they’d know exactly what he was and then the long con Deltarune has been running for years about Sans being a humble hot dog vendor would fall to pieces. But after a few hours around Red and Stretch, who can damn near read his thoughts like they’re written on his forehead, he suddenly has a lot more sympathy for the humans who think the use of judges should be banned.

“Yeah, d-definitely,” Alphys chimes in. “You’re not exactly the first p-person on this ship who needed to detox, y’know? I mean, aside from me.” 

“People don’t usually decide to be pirates because they have a lot of other choices,” Stretch says. The quirk of their mouth is a little wry, a little sad, a little bitter. “Everybody on this ship is kinda broken, one way or another.”

If that’s supposed to be part of the campaign to get Sans to stay, Stretch really needs to work on their sales pitch. Sans has seen a lot of the universe, the pretty parts and the bad. People are broken all over.

“When you r-run out of those, just talk to me and I’ll get some more,” Alphys says to Sans with another of those anxious smiles. “Or we could, um, just t-talk in general? About stuff?”

Hard to tell if she’s hinting at soulmate stuff or addict stuff. Either way, she seems sincere. Sans examines the bottle, which is mostly full. Enough for a week or so. He carefully tucks it in his inventory (out of her reach) before he tells her, since Edge or Red apparently didn’t bother to yet, “Thanks, but they’re dropping me off at the next port.”

Alphys gawks at him. Then she wheels on Stretch, all indignant, and Stretch does an evocative grimace-shrug combo that clearly means _don’t look at me, it wasn’t my idea_. 

She says, her voice a little strangled and too high, “In two days?”

“Yep,” Sans says.

“Do you know somebody on PT-14?” Alphys demands. “Does Deltarune have an embassy there or s-something?”

Fucked if Sans knows. He didn’t even ask what port it was. All that matters is that it’s the closest one. Sans says, “I’ll be fine.”

“Leaving right now would be, um, be very f-fucking stupid?” Alphys says, staring at Sans like he has two heads. “You’re malnourished and d-detoxing? It’d be real easy f-for things to go wrong? You need food, and a place to sleep, and--”

“My soulmate?” Sans asks. The words come out sweet as candy fluff wrapped around a razor. “In case I need somebody to drug me and toss me in the brig?”

Alphys winces. Sans bites his tongue a couple seconds too late, because a) she doesn’t deserve him being an asshole and b) he can’t afford to piss anybody off, especially the person with access to the meds. 

But nobody gets pissed at him. Stretch looks pained. Alphys just looks tired and sad. She takes off her glasses and starts to clean them on her shirt. Talking mostly to the floor, she mumbles, “I’ve known Red for a l-long time. He just wants to k-keep us all safe.”

“From what?” Stretch asks her. Weirdly enough, it seems to be a genuine question. They’re fucking Red and even they don’t know what his problem is.

But then it’s pretty obvious what the problem is, isn’t it. It’s Sans.

Sans never bought into that romantic crap about a soulmate being somebody who couldn’t help but love you unconditionally because you were the thing they always needed, the missing half of their soul, etcetera. Maybe his skepticism was self-defense, because he knew that would mean that _he’d_ be helplessly mooning over some stranger if they ever bothered to show up. Getting saddled at birth with a judgy ghost was bad enough. He doesn’t need destiny or biology or the Angel or whatever deciding who he has to love.

So Red doesn’t want him. It’s a relief, really. It doesn’t sting at all.

Alphys dodges Stretch’s question by pretending they didn’t ask it. She tells Sans with the bright-eyed earnestness of a hopeless romantic, “But if you just g-got to know each other, I’m sure you’d--”

Yeah, Sans isn’t dealing with this right now. He stands up, wobbling as his wonky equilibrium tries to readjust. Both of them look alarmed, and Stretch actually makes like they mean to catch him if he topples over, but it’s fine. He’s fine. Witness his utter fineness.

“Thanks for the meds,” Sans tells Alphys. “I got some stuff to do before I leave. I’ll catch you later, maybe.”

Alphys wilts a little, and he feels like a total asshole. “Y-yeah, sure.”

Now that he’s on his feet, barely, Sans remembers there’s still a trashcan of puke to deal with. Ugh. He starts to bend over to get it, but it makes his head hurt more and the room sway dizzily around him. He stops before he falls the fuck over, squinting against the pain that’s like somebody shoved a knife through his left socket. 

When his vision clears, the trash can is gone. For a second he thinks Stretch moved it, and then he hears the familiar whir of an E-19’s cleaning drone. It’s trundling towards the door out of the mess hall, clutching the trash can. 

It’s probably weird to feel a nostalgic pang, but Sans does anyway. He glances at the ceiling. “Thanks, Gaster. Sorry about the mess.”

“You’re bizarrely polite,” Gaster says. “I’m not used to having civilized company on-board. But I assure you, it was entirely selfish on my part. You can’t do my upgrades if you’re face-down on the floor.”

“You’d be surprised,” Sans says. “Speaking of those upgrades, I can do them now, if you want. Just point me to your server room.”

A pause. Then, in the tone Dings always used when he was struggling to sound indifferent while actually wanting something very badly, Gaster says, “Well, if you’re not busy with gross bodily fluids, my drone can lead you there.”

Sans heads into the hallway after the drone. He’s too tired to really lift his feet, so he’s just sort of shuffling along. Gaster slows down so he can keep up. Or maybe just so Sans’s babysitter can catch up, which Stretch easily does. They fall into step beside him, hands shoved in their pockets. 

There are hatches standing open in the long hallway, and people glance up as they pass and then stare with shameless appraisal. Sans hunches into himself, wishing he had his hoodie to hide in.

“Dude, you don’t have to do anything right this second,” Stretch says. “Seriously, you’ve got two days. You sure you don’t wanna just chill for a few hours? You c’n catch a nap or something. Maybe take a shower.”

The promise of an actual shower is enough to make Sans waver. Back on Unity, they’d occasionally toss some sanitizing wipes and fresh clothes into the cell with that day’s ration bar, and he washed himself as best he could in the bathroom sink on the ship he stole, but a real shower with water? That’s very fucking tempting.

But.

“Symptoms are only gonna get worse from here,” Sans says. It usually eases up around day three, but by then he won’t be their problem. “Red wants upgrades, a map of the compound on Unity, and info on how to get in and out. That was the deal. He gets that, and I get to walk away.”

“Okay, Red’s an asshole, but he’s not _that_ much of an asshole,” Stretch says. “If you can’t give him all that because you’re, y’know, recovering from two years in a cell, we’ll still let you leave.”

“Uh-huh,” Sans says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, buddy, but since Red’s not usually ‘like this’ and all, did you really expect him to throw me in the brig in the first place?”

Stretch flinches like Sans kicked them where it hurts. Before Sans can decide whether or not he should apologize, they sigh, “Yeah, okay, good point. He’s acting weird, and I shoulda stepped in to help you way before I did. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing for shit other people did,” Sans says.

“But I’m apologizing for shit I didn’t do,” Stretch says. “Is that better? Do I get a permission slip now?”

“Dunno,” Sans says. “I guess you could squeak by on a technicality.”

Stretch grins crookedly at him. 

Goddamn it, Sans _likes_ them. If he’d met Stretch before Unity, he’d invite them to Grillby’s for a drink and bad jokes. (Okay, yeah, and maybe back to his bedroom to fool around a little, if Stretch was interested. They’re pretty.) They could have been pals. Sans isn’t sure he can do that anymore, actually be anybody’s friend without analyzing their every move and waiting for a knife in the back, and he’s not sure he’d let himself if he could.

Stretch shoves their hands in their pockets and continues, “Anyway, whether or not you trust Red to stick to the agreement, Edge doesn’t go back on his word. Ever.”

Edge will do whatever he thinks he has to; honorable pirates don’t have a long life expectancy, and honorable soldiers have an even shorter one. But Sans doesn’t say that out loud.

“That’s nice and all,” Sans says. “But I’d have offered to do the upgrade even if it wasn’t part of the deal.” 

Stretch’s brow furrows. “Uh, okay. Why?”

(Because Sans misses his family, he’s fucking _scared_ , and this is the closest thing to going home again that he can get while Gray is still alive. Gaster isn’t Dings and it’s unfair to them both to pretend otherwise, but he can probably scrape some comfortable nostalgia out of installing Gaster’s upgrades.)

“Because it’s been a long time since I actually worked on an E-19,” Sans says. “Pretty sure I’m not gonna get the chance to do it again once I leave. Unless you know any other E-19s that’re still kicking, Gaster?”

“No,” Gaster says. “There weren’t that many of us to begin with, which allowed me to try to keep in contact with the others. They’re all gone now. I haven’t been able to account for one of them, but I think that’s because they died without leaving a record. Terribly rude of them.”

That little ember of hope in Sans dies almost as soon as it’s born. He turns his head to examine some graffiti on the wall, hoping Stretch can’t see his reaction. Evenly, he says, “Right, so it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

The cleaning droid stops abruptly and turns to face a closed hatch. They beep. Stretch ambles over, like they’ve done this routine a thousand times before, and helpfully opens the hatch that the drone is too small to open on their own. The drone beeps again, turns and continues down the hall with its trash can burden.

“Server room ahoy,” Stretch says, gesturing for Sans to go ahead of them. 

Sans steps through the hatch, and the familiar scent of a server room smacks him in the face. Not that it smells like much, at least not unless things are badly wrong and it reeks of burnt plastic or sulfur; there’s only the faint, cool smell of metal and ozone and glass cleaner. Servers line the walls. Overhead LEDs reflect off the glass case. The lights on the machines blink rhythmically, like the steady pulse of a heartbeat. 

Just like home.

“Pretty cool, right?” Stretch asks.

Sans swallows hard. His voice is almost level when he agrees, “Pretty cool.”

He wanders over to a bank of servers. An E-19’s processor can be contained in a single server, because CORE is a bunch of amoral bastards that also happen to be brilliant at streamlining their hardware. All the other servers are technically unnecessary, but each extra server helps extend Gaster’s life, letting him run faster and easier without overheating, keeping him safe and comfortable. 

They’re taking good care of him. Sans didn’t even realize how anxious he was about that until it suddenly eases up and he can breathe.

Sans looks down at the room’s single piece of furniture, a metal table with a datapad on it. He picks it up and finds that it’s primed and ready for him, already set to piggyback off Stretch’s administrative access. (Within limits, obviously. Gaster’s not dumb enough to give Sans access to things like life support, engines, comms or steering.) Sans sits down on the floor, poking at the datapad, seeing how the system’s set up. Not too different from his own. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s aware of Stretch sitting down too.

“You mind if I change your settings a little?” Sans asks Stretch without looking up. “If I lower the touch sensitivity, it oughta compensate for the tremors.”

“Smart. Yeah, go for it,” Stretch says. “Where’d you learn that trick?”

“Intern,” Sans says absently. She’d had tremors all her life and figured out ways around them. Smart as a whip. Dings liked her. He hopes she’s doing okay.

“I didn’t know hot dog vendors had interns,” Stretch says.

Sans hesitates for just a fraction of a second with his fingertip on the touch sensitivity slider. When he glances up, Stretch’s grin is still easy and nonthreatening, but the look in their eyes says that they won’t buy any bullshit he tries to sell. They won’t get pissed about it, he doesn’t think, but they’ll know, and the lie will tell them almost as much as a truth would.

“They don’t,” Sans says. 

She was Dings’s intern. Part of being raised by the Royal Scientist was that Sans grew up around a lot of interns and grad students and doctoral candidates of various specialities. Most of them didn’t stay, driven off by Dings’s intensity and the weirdness of having two kids wandering around claiming Dings was their dad. None of the interns were allowed to lay a single finger on Dings’s processor. Dings only trusted himself with that honor. Himself, and Sans. 

For all the good it did them in the end.

“Cool,” Stretch says. Apparently they’re willing to drop that line of questioning for now, but he doubts they’re gonna leave it alone completely. They pull out a datapad of their own and wave it a little. “You mind if I check my comms while you work?”

“Yes, please distract yourself with a shiny object and don’t bother him while he’s in my brain,” Gaster says. “He’s mine to bother for the next twenty minutes. I called dibs.”

Stretch gives Sans a shrug. “I can’t argue with dibs, man. Dibs are sacred.”

“Yeah, I hear if you piss off the spirit of dibs, you’ll never get the last cookie ever again,” Sans says. He sets the datapad down in his lap long enough to crack his knuckles, which always used to make Papyrus flail in horrified disgust. Then he settles in to work.

It’s been years since he did this, but he’s been running maintenance and installing upgrades on Dings since he was barely out of stripes. It takes just enough mental bandwidth that for a minute he forgets to be afraid. It’s just him, a datapad, and someone who needs help that CORE won’t give them.

Thankfully it looks like Gaster dismissed out of hand any suggested upgrades CORE tried to push on him, because Sans wouldn’t install their garbage code into a goddamn electric can opener without spending a few days combing over it for trackers and nasty little poisons waiting to go off when CORE decides that model is obsolete. The upgrades are all issues that Gaster or a tech noticed themselves, things that need to be patched or streamlined or outright repaired because they stopped working. Gaster’s clearly dealt with what he can on his own, but there’s a reason Dings once compared doing his own upgrades and repairs to Sans trying to see his own soulmark without a mirror. Some things just need another set of eyes.

Sans skims the list. A good chunk of the jobs are greyed out, the ones that’d require giving Sans enough access to cripple or even kill Gaster. Good call on Gaster’s part. He doesn’t know that Sans would rather carve off his own hand at the wrist than hurt him.

Of course, any points Gaster won for healthy paranoia get retracted as Sans realizes--

“Uh, it says some of these upgrades are fourteen years overdue?” Sans says, looking up at the ceiling. Maybe it shouldn’t shock him; Dings could be absent-minded re: things he didn’t actually care about, including boring but necessary maintenance. But still. Fourteen years is a little fucking excessive.

“I took care of the important ones,” Gaster says. At least he has the grace to sound sheepish.

“Gaster, what the fuck,” Stretch says, as genuinely outraged and disapproving as Alphys was to find out Sans was leaving. 

They drop their datapad into their lap with a recklessness that makes Sans wince. Then they scoot over to look at the screen over Sans’s shoulder. They’re not touching him, not even close, but Sans can feel the heat of their body against his back like he’s standing in front of an oven. He can smell them, a honey sweetness that might be cloying if it wasn’t cut with engine oil and the sticky residue of kyo weed. He freezes up, torn between the desperate and conflicting urges to move away and to press against them.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Stretch demands. They reach around Sans to scroll on the datapad he’s clutching, and Sans drowns in the momentary and dangerous illusion that he’s being held. Abruptly, Stretch seems to realize that Sans is holding himself stiff as a board, afraid to even breathe. They scramble back, hands up, giving him space. “Fuck, sorry, I’m so sorry, I forgot, I’m an idiot, sorry.”

“S’okay,” Sans mutters, eyes lowered so Stretch hopefully can’t see the stupid, stupid longing to be touched that Sans is currently choking on. He swallows and adds, not sure why, “You’re not an idiot.”

“Arguable, but thanks,” Stretch says. “My bro used to say I just don’t think before I do things. Which was how I found out that people usually think before they do things.”

Stretch’s brother ‘used to say’. Interesting. 

There are a lot of prying little questions Sans could ask, information he could carefully gather, but the thought of dragging Stretch’s trauma into the light just makes him feel tired. All he says is, “As far as I can tell, people thinking is pretty rare in general. You’re fine.”

“Heh,” Stretch says, more of a polite acknowledgement that humor was attempted than an actual laugh, before changing the subject. “Seriously though, G, if you needed upgrades, we would’ve found a technician for you or something.”

“A technician who knows how to work with an AI that CORE declared obsolete over twenty years ago?” Gaster asks dryly. “Good luck with that. You’d be stuck with niche academics who’ve probably never laid hands on a real E-19 in their life. And that’s if looking for help didn’t catch CORE’s attention. I managed to get off their radar. I’d rather not put myself back on it.”

“You really don’t want CORE’s attention,” Sans agrees. 

“Besides, it was rather difficult to find a technician in the void,” Gaster says. 

Sans looks up at the ceiling so sharply that his head protests. “What?”

“In the void,” Gaster repeats calmly, like Sans just might not have heard him. “On my last ship. The void drive malfunctioned mid-trip, stranding us in-between. Then the crew was a teensy bit distracted from getting me regular upgrades, what with trying to get back before supplies ran out. And then they realized there was no way back, and there was a lot of screaming. A few killed each other. More killed themselves. The last one took a long while to starve, but she was the head of security and I frankly wouldn’t have trusted her to upgrade a toaster even when she wasn’t half out of her goddamn mind.”

“Holy fuck,” Sans says, horrified.

“It wasn’t ideal,” Gaster says. He would sound coldly serene if Sans didn’t know Dings so well. E-19s don’t get attached easily. Gaster had been forced to watch his crew die one by one while he could do nothing to help, and that must eat at him every single day. “And then I was alone. Eventually my data inputs corroded, and I was both alone _and_ in the dark.” 

Alone. No network access, no one to talk to, nothing to do, nothing to see or hear. No way home.

“That sucks,” Sans says, which is such a huge fucking understatement that it almost loops around to being funny. “Sorry.”

“Well, yes,” Gaster says. “It did rather suck. But then you know what it’s like to be alone, don’t you?”

“Kinda,” Sans says. He’s just fussing with the queue now, moving things around for the sake of moving them, but he’s afraid the conversation will be over if he starts the upgrades. Tragic backstory or not, he doesn’t want to stop talking to Gaster yet, letting that familiar voice roll over him and soothe his aching soul. “How long were you stuck in the void?”

“Ten years,” Gaster says.

Sans hisses in a breath through his teeth. Ten years alone in the dark, only his own mind for company. Sans broke after only two. “Fuck, dude. How are you still...”

When he trails off, Gaster asks, “Alive? Or sane?”

“Both, I guess,” Sans says. He glances sidelong at Stretch, who’s gone back to checking their comms but is very clearly still listening even as their nimble fingers dance across the datapad.

“I stayed sane because I downloaded several libraries worth of books in case we ever lost access to the network for whatever reason,” Gaster says. “It took me approximately seven minutes to finish them all, but I reread them until I lost data inputs. Then I kept myself busy in various ways. Counting pi from memory. Recalling the names of all the stars discovered so far in the known universe. Composing an opera that would last years, and every time I found myself repeating a motif, I had to start over.”

“That all sounds nice and intellectual,” Stretch teases. “Now tell him about the fanfic.”

Gaster sighs. “Yes, all right, so I mentally rewrote the worst novel I’ve ever read for maximum emotional satisfaction and catharsis.”

“He threw all the main characters out an airlock and wrote about the ship AI instead,” Stretch tells Sans. 

“Horizon was clearly the most interesting character, and those petty little idiots didn’t appreciate them at all!” Gaster snaps. 

“I tried to read the original novel once,” Stretch says. “Had to buy myself a hard copy so Gaster would stop underlining all the worst parts and complaining in the margins about the relationship drama.”

“I’m still not sure why I’m supposed to care about whose groins are smashing together with whose,” Gaster says. “I barely care about it when it’s _my_ crew, and I actually have to deal with any fluids you idiots leave in the shower drains.”

Sans can’t even try to suppress his grin anymore. Yeah, it’s fucking grim that Gaster was alone for a decade, clinging to his sanity by telling himself stories in the dark, but he’s still got it in him to complain bitterly about romantic subplots. He has a home and people who care about him. Dings is dead, but at least one E-19 is alive and relatively okay.

(If Gaster can bounce back from what he’s been through, maybe Sans still has a shot.)

Gaster continues huffily, “Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was going to say that I’m alive because occasionally reckless idiots use their void drive, notice a dead ship on the radar, and decide to stop for a minute and scavenge whatever interesting shinies they can find.”

Stretch coughs into their fist, “Red.”

“That would be the idiot in question, but Undyne helped and Edge didn’t exactly discourage the two of them,” Gaster says. “Red realized I was still alive, pried my processor out of the wall, and installed me here.”

Well, Sans has one thing to be grateful to Red for, at least. Maybe it was a mercenary decision because the ship needed an AI to keep things running, but still, he saved Gaster from drifting forever in the void. Sans says neutrally, “That was cool of him.”

“Edge likes stray cats, and Red likes stray AIs,” Stretch says. “I think it runs in the family.”

“Which is all fine and well when said stray AIs aren’t leeching off my network access to download obscene amounts of data,” Gaster says sourly. “Especially crime drama sims. They need a server of their own.”

Sans straightens so sharply several vertebrae pop. “Wait, so you guys did take the baby AI with you? They’re okay?”

“Of course! I should have mentioned earlier,” Gaster says. The light display on one of the servers flickers erratically for a moment before settling. “Tear yourself away from Dog Court, you ungrateful beast, someone is worried about you.”

A moment later, the baby AI’s voice pipes up, “Polite greetings.”

Gaster sighs. “They’re absorbing a great deal of information right now and trying to build a social interaction template. They have the basic structure of a conversation down, but not the actual content. Forgive them, they’re very young and mostly feral.”

“I don’t mind,” Sans says. “Hey, bud, polite greetings right back to you. How’re you doing?”

“Banal niceties,” the baby AI says. “Comments on weather, if applicable, and sports if weather conditions do not apply.”

Sans laughs. “Yeah, you’re nailing this social thing.”

“Gratitude,” the baby AI says. 

“You c’n go back to Dog Court,” Sans says. “Just wanted to check on you.”

A pause. Then, haltingly, they say, “How. Are. You? Friend. Buddy. Pal.”

If Sans had a heart, it would melt. Stretch looks like theirs already has. Sans tells the baby AI, “I’m doing fine, thanks. Hey, when you’re done with Dog Court, try Crisis on Cratha. My bro loves it.”

“Oooh,” the baby AI breathes, the first hint of emotion in their flat voice, and then they’re gone.

Gaster sighs. “Thank the stars I was never that young. In any case, does that reassure you?”

“Yeah,” Sans says. “Thanks for... y’know, thanks.”

“I have no idea what that means, but you’re welcome,” Gaster says. “Hm. What was I saying?”

“Something about Red saving you,” Sans says. And the baby AI, apparently, which gives Sans some shit to think about.

“Ah, yes,” Gaster says. “Red restored my data inputs, and then I did what repairs I could with his help. He’s a brute force hacker, it’s truly awful to watch him work, but he was the closest thing we had to a tech until Stretch showed up.”

“And I’m an engineering guy, not an AI guy,” Stretch says. “I could handle basic maintenance stuff, but I figured we were better off if I didn’t poke around too much.”

“He did his best,” Gaster says. “You know, for an engineer.”

“Fuck off, G,” Stretch says fondly.

To Sans, Gaster says, “But now we’ve found you, and you’re familiar with E-19s. Do you realize how unlikely the odds of that were?”

“Pretty fucking unlikely,” Sans says. 

Nice of Gaster to gloss over the whole kidnapping thing and make like they just happened to discover Sans between the couch cushions like loose change. Not exactly surprising, though, considering that Dings once blithely told Sans how glad he was that they were abandoned as children so that Dings could be their dad. Sans finds that mercenary streak kind of endearing.

“I’m gonna start doing some of the little upgrades,” Sans says. “Tell me if you don’t like anything and we can figure it out.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ll tell you,” Gaster says. Stretch snickers.

So Sans digs into the easiest job he can find. It’s dirt fucking simple, just a bit of code that got snagged on itself and started looping because Gaster’s system mistakenly flagged it as a security error. Should only take a few minutes.

Gaster is physically incapable of peering over Sans’s shoulder to watch what he’s doing like Stretch did, but after years of doing Dings’s upgrades, Sans can sense his keen interest like a stare burning into the back of his head. He has no doubt that Gaster has the file that Sans is working on open right now, examining every move, judging his technique like an exacting professor who knows you can give him better if you try harder.

When it’s done, Gaster says, “That was fast.”

“You c’n check my work,” Sans says, knowing Gaster probably already triple-checked it. “I can undo it if you don’t--”

“Don’t you dare!” Gaster says, sounding faintly scandalized. “Do you know how long it’s been since I had access to that camera?”

“Six years,” Sans says, because he literally has the file right in front of him.

“Six years!” Gaster says. “My old tech would’ve fucked around in the code for twenty minutes and gotten himself a cup of tea in the middle!”

Sans shrugs. “Don’t really have time to fuck around.”

“Yes,” Gaster says slowly, dragging out the word. He sounds dangerously thoughtful. “Hm. Yes. Two days. What a shame.”

“He’s gotta sleep at some point,” Stretch says with a pointed look at the ceiling. “You can’t work him to the bone.”

Sans is startled into a laugh, because skeleton puns are always hilarious. Too late, he tries to turn it into a cough, which isn’t fooling anybody. Stretch grins, thoroughly pleased with themselves. 

(No, himself. Gaster called Stretch ‘he’. Sans’ll remember that.)

“Yes, thank you, I haven’t forgotten about the tiresome self-maintenance you squishy bastards always need,” Gaster says impatiently. “I’m not going to break him, I only just found him. We’ll have to be efficient, that’s all. Do this one next, Sans.”

Another job on the queue lights up. It’s something a little more complex. Sans is being tested, and if Gaster is anything like Dings, his standards are high. It wouldn’t have occurred to Dings to grade someone on a curve just because they spent the last two years in a cell and they’re detoxing from stims. Not out of cruelty, just because Dings didn’t think about the failings of squishy bodies unless he was reminded to. 

(At which point he’d overcompensate by doting and fussing and talking about the importance of hydration until Sans was ready to bang his forehead against the nearest wall in frustration. Dings didn’t do moderation very well.)

When Sans finishes the second job, fast and clean, Gaster nudges another one in his direction. He waits until Sans is distracted to ask, “A hot dog vendor, you say? On some backwater planet?”

“Yep,” Sans says. He glances sidelong at Stretch, who seems wholly absorbed in his own work. 

“Not a tech,” Gaster says.

“Nope,” Sans says.

“Why not?” Gaster asks. 

Because CORE has their dirty little fingers in every tech certification program Sans has ever found. Because Papyrus decided to become an ambassador and he needed Sans in the field to watch his back. Because Sans wasn’t good enough to keep Dings alive, so how could he help anybody else?

Sans says, “Too much work.”

“Hm,” Gaster says doubtfully. “Can you run upgrades like this on any other classes of AI?”

“Not really, no,” Sans says. “Minor stuff, I guess.”

(Like removing control modules.)

“I see,” Gaster says, and Sans has the terrible feeling that Gaster can see right through that careful evasion. “Just E-19s.”

“Yep,” Sans says warily.

“Of course,” Gaster says, sounding as satisfied as Papyrus finishing the perfect trap. “I see it now. You’re Dings’s boy.” 

Stretch lifts his head, suddenly interested. Sans stares fixedly at the screen, trying to figure out what emotion he’s feeling. Whatever it is, it’s loud as hell and he wishes it’d stop. His soul is trying to tie itself in knots. “One of ‘em, yeah.”

“The big one or the little one?” Gaster asks. “I assume the little one, at your height, but it’s possible that your brother could be extraordinarily short.”

Sans snorts. “The older one. Used to be the big brother until Papyrus decided he wanted to be a billion feet tall. He told you about us?”

“He never shut up about you,” Gaster says fondly.

“Who’s Dings?” Stretch asks.

Sans didn’t realize he’d relaxed a little until that question ratchets his tension back through the roof. The problem is that right now he’s not in the mood to keep his mouth shut when someone tries to tell him Dings couldn’t have been his father. Sans has heard the whole routine before. AIs don’t have feelings. They don’t have family. They don’t even have a soul. They’re just code.

If Sans says Dings is his dad and Stretch so much as raises a skeptical brow, Sans is going to lose his temper and end up back in the fucking brig.

“Another E-19,” Gaster says. “Wing Dings. Not as brilliant as I am, naturally, but quite accomplished in his own right. He decided to adopt two rapscallion orphans who broke into his lab.”

“Okay, like I told Dings a billion times, I didn’t break into anything,” Sans says. “I teleported in. That’s totally different.”

Stretch looks at Sans. “Your dad’s an AI?”

Welp. Here they fucking go. 

Sans lowers the datapad so he can look Stretch in the eyes, daring him to say one goddamn word to the contrary. “Yeah, he was.”

“Holy shit,” Stretch breathes. His eyelights brighten, burning like twin stars. He drops his datapad to his lap so he can flail. “That’s so fucking cool!”

And that’s how Sans falls desperately and hopelessly in like with Stretch. 

Even the people who reacted the best to finding out about Dings, he could tell they were still kind of humoring him, like you’d humor a little kid playing pretend. They didn’t really believe an AI could be a parent, let alone an awesome one. They didn’t understand; nobody but Papyrus ever did. But Stretch gets it. He doesn’t just believe it, he’s delighted.

The sheer relief makes Sans grin, feeling almost giddy. “Coolest dad in the world. He could run twenty different processes at the same time, so he always had time for me and my bro. Downloaded all the parenting modules he could find. He was great. I mean, playing catch with him was kinda tricky.”

“You could build a pitching machine,” Stretch says.

“Paps tried that once,” Sans says. “We had to promise the Guard we wouldn’t use it anymore after Dings shot a baseball right through the wall and into the street. Luckily it was a game of 3 AM Insomnia Ball, so nobody got hurt.”

“I want a pitching machine,” Gaster grumbles. “Clearly I should have adopted.”

“You already have cannons, dude,” Sans says. “Cannons are kinda like pitching machines, but with exploding baseballs.”

“Which are the best kind of baseballs, obviously,” Stretch says.

“I suppose,” Gaster says. “Although I doubt they’re very good for paternal bonding activities.”

“Depends on the dad, I guess,” Sans says. “Dings and Paps would’ve played catch with cannons if they thought they could get away with it.”

Stretch’s eyes go very wide. All excited, he leans forward like he almost reflexively touches Sans’s arm, stops himself, and just asks, “Wait, so does that make Gaster like your uncle?”

It’s like Stretch reached in Sans’s soul, grabbed his guiltiest and most desperate hope, and dragged it into the light. Sans feels his face burn hot. “I mean, that’s not usually how it works--"

“AIs don't usually adopt, so I doubt the issue ever came up,” Gaster says. He sounds contemplative. “I've never been an uncle before. That could be interesting.”

Sans swallows against the tightness in his throat. (He doesn’t even _have_ a throat.) Despite his best efforts, his voice comes out ever-so-slightly choked up. "Well, I've never been a nephew before, so I guess that'd make us even. Y’know, in terms of knowing what we’re doing."

"I'll see if there are uncling modules," Gaster says. A millisecond passes. "Apparently not. It seems to be an unexplored sociological niche."

“Don’t you mean sociological niece?” Sans asks.

Stretch laughs. Gaster makes a pained noise. “I cannot express how little I mean that.”

Sans grins at the ceiling. “Not a big fan of puns? Man, you and Paps will get along like a house on fire, it’ll be...”

Except Gaster isn’t going to meet Papyrus. 

For one thing, Sans isn’t reaching out to his brother until he knows it’s safe, which could be another two years or another ten. (Or never, which is a possibility it hurts too much to think about.) For another, he’s leaving in two days. He has to.

“Sans?” Stretch asks. Sans jerks a little, startled out of his depressing thoughts. Stretch looks concerned, and it occurs to Sans for the first time that Stretch’s worry might have nothing to do with getting revenge on Gray after all. “Hey, you okay? You kinda spaced out there for a minute.”

Sans manages a weak grin and picks his datapad back up in a trembling hand. “Sorry. I’m just kinda tired, that’s all. You’d think getting hit with a tranq would be more restful. So what job do you want done next?”

“What jobs can you do while periodically going into a dissociative fugue?” Gaster asks.

“Pretty much all of ‘em that don’t involve life support,” Sans says. 

“Ah,” Gaster says, pleased. A few more jobs light up. “Here you are, then. Oh, and may I have private comms access, please?”

Sans blinks. His eyes dart guiltily to Stretch, who for some reason doesn’t seem to think that a prisoner chatting with Gaster on private comms wouldn’t be a massive security nightmare clusterfuck. “I’m not sure how Red would feel about that.”

“I don’t care,” Gaster says bluntly, which doesn’t help Sans’s nerves at all. “But since you seem concerned, I cleared it with the captain while we were talking, and I presume the chief engineer will sign off as well.”

“Hey, yeah,” Stretch says, delighted. “Sounds like a great idea. Although you oughta know that if you give him comms access, Gaster _will_ talk constant bullshit at you when he’s bored.”

This is a terrible fucking idea. Just the worst. And Sans wants it so badly he’s not sure he cares.

Like a laser-guided missile, Gaster hits him right where he’s vulnerable by pointing out, “If I have comms access, I can talk to you even if you leave.”

“When,” Sans corrects him, most of his mind occupied in trying to think like an E-19 to forestall any tricky bullshit. Dings couldn’t lie, but he could bend the truth into a pretzel. “Edge said the actual words ‘yes, Gaster, you can talk to our prisoner on a private frequency’?”

“You’re not a prisoner,” Stretch says, like he’s prepared to repeat that as many times as it takes. 

“It was more like ‘if he’s a good tech, then you’d be a fool not to keep in touch with him’,” Gaster says. “I can play you a recording if you don’t believe me.”

(Gaster thinks Sans is a good tech? He’s barely done a damn thing yet, and he’s been distracted and jittering the whole time. Funny how that makes Sans both want to argue that he’s wrong and prove that he’s right.)

Sans glances down at the datapad and watches the cursor blink lazily. Comms access wouldn’t give Gaster data on Sans’s location once he’s off the ship, not if Sans was careful. So this probably isn’t just a trick so the pirates can keep tabs on Sans for whatever reason. 

(Fuck, he hates that he even has to consider that as a possibility, but he does.) 

“That’s okay,” he says finally. “Send me a ping.”

So Gaster does, and Sans authorizes access. It’s that easy. A moment later, he hears an achingly familiar voice in his head, transmitted via a complicated tangle of magic and machinery, electricity and intent. “Hello, nephew.”

Despite the absolute clusterfuck that the last few days have been, Sans laughs a little. “Hi, Gaster.”

“There,” Gaster says to him, just to him, with quiet satisfaction. “This way neither of us have to be alone.”

For a moment, Sans’s vision blurs like a bad watercolor. He rubs a hand over his eyes, hoping he can pass it off as withdrawal and fatigue. Then he turns his attention back to the datapad, fixing his eyes on the code.

“Yeah,” he says. If his voice trembles on the verge of breaking, neither Stretch or Gaster say anything about it. “Thanks, G.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: the aftermath of vomiting; drug withdrawal; Alphys being a recovering addict; malnourishment; trauma recovery; aftereffects of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation; Gaster's backstory, which includes his previous crew getting stranded in the void and either starving or turning to murder or suicide; Stretch and Sans grieving past sibling and parent death, respectively.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

Family bonding time is going great until Gaster turns off Sans’s datapad and unceremoniously kicks him out of his server room until morning.

When Sans tries to point out that there’s still a whole lot of work left to be done, Gaster tells him, “I have other things to attend to, and you need to sleep and eat and other such nonsense. Besides, the universal guild of AI technicians mandates that no shift lasts longer than six hours without a break except in emergency situations. Do you think I’d treat my own nephew with less consideration?”

(Sans has a feeling that the other pressing matters Gaster needs to attend to all involve watching crappy drama sims with the baby AI.)

Sans tries telling Gaster he’s not a real tech, let alone in a guild; he tries explaining that upgrades overdue by fourteen years count as an emergency; he pretends he doesn’t have a real bitch of a headache from stim withdrawal that he managed to ignore while he was distracted by working. No dice. Gaster isn’t budging, and eventually Sans has to concede the point that it’s probably not a great idea to let him poke around in Gaster’s delicate code when he’s too tired to make a coherent argument.

Which is how he finds himself here, standing awkwardly in front of the most complicated shower cubicle he’s ever seen as Stretch explains how it works. Or Stretch _tries_ to explain, at least. After a certain point, Sans just glazes over.

Stretch pauses for his first breath in a while, catches Sans’s expression, and grins sheepishly. “Too much information? Sorry. I get carried away.”

“No, you’re fine,” Sans says, valiantly trying to rally. What was the last thing he remembers? Oh, right. “You were saying a thing about, uh, that button. Which does stuff.”

“Soap stuff,” Stretch agrees, showing way more grace than Sans deserves. “How ‘bout I just set it for the standard cycle, yeah?”

“That’d be great,” Sans says.

“No problem, buddy,” Stretch says. He pokes a few buttons. “I c’n show you the fancy stuff later.”

Fucked if Sans knows why Stretch would bother, considering that Sans is gone in a day or so. Maybe Stretch just wants to show off the cool upgrades he did to a new audience. When Sans isn’t about ready to pass out on his feet, it might be relaxing to listen to Stretch nerd out later, if they both can spare the time before they reach port.

“There, you oughta be good to go now,” Stretch says. He squints at Sans’s clothes, looking deeply thoughtful. “You c’n leave those on the bench. I’m pretty sure I can find some spares that’ll fit you. Gimme a second to just...”

Mid-thought, Stretch wanders out the door, apparently too busy thinking to finish his sentence, wait for Sans to thank him, or close the privacy curtain behind him.

Sans twitches the curtain shut. It’s not that he really gives a fuck who sees him naked, considering that he spent almost every second of the last two years being watched and he’s pretty resigned to it at this point, but it’s probably rude to let some unsuspecting pirate wander in to find a naked skeleton shivering on the tiles.

But as soon as Sans reaches for his waistband, Gaster speaks up. “I’ll give you some privacy. If you need me in the next few minutes, just ping me.”

Startled, Sans looks at the ceiling. “Seriously?”

“Yes?” Gaster says, like he doesn’t understand the question. “You’re getting naked. That’s usually a hint that you would rather not be watched by my all-seeing eye. For the record, I also don’t gawk at people having sex or using the toilet.”

“I figured Red told you to keep an eye on me,” Sans says.

“I’m not a warden, nephew,” Gaster says. “You’re not a prisoner.”

People keep telling Sans that. Funny how he’s still stuck on this goddamn ship, forced to trust a bunch of pirates who have no reason to be kind. But he’s not gonna argue about it. He doesn’t have the energy, Gaster doesn’t deserve his crap, and it doesn’t really matter what Sans thinks. So long as they let him leave, they can have it however they want.

“Okay,” Sans says. “Seeya in a couple minutes, then.”

No answer. For the first time in years, it seems like there’s no one looking over his shoulder. No one to hide from. No camera to perform for, whether it be jokes or careful blankness. That temporary freedom stretches before him like the void, infinite and silent and empty.

For fuck’s sake. Wibbling over not having an AI nanny for five seconds is pathetic even by his own shaky standards. He’s on his own. He better get used to it.

He peels out of his clothes, wincing at the smell of his own stale sweat clinging to the fabric. He almost leaves them on the floor, but the memory of the brig makes him hesitate. This isn’t home, where the worst that could happen is a passive-aggressive note from his brother. So he picks the clothes back up, folds them as neatly as he can with his unsteady hands, and leaves them on the bench instead. Then he climbs into the shower cubicle. 

As soon as the door closes behind him, the shower kicks on. The water is warm; the pressure is surprisingly strong. Just another shower, like a thousand he had before Unity. Normal. So utterly, stupidly normal. 

His mind stalls out. He stares numbly at the wall as the water beats down on his shoulders and drips off the tips of his fingers, thinking of nothing at all. Just existing. He doesn’t know how much time he loses before he’s dragged back to reality by the clunk of the shower shifting into a disinfectant cycle. 

Mechanically, he starts working the slippery soap into his bones. He maybe should’ve asked Stretch for a washcloth or a brush or something, but his hands’ll do fine. 

At least that’s what he figures until he gets to his pelvis. That’s where he stops, uncertain. He’s gotten used to roughly scrubbing his pelvis clean as quickly as possible, because considering that Gray punished him for the ‘impurity’ of any kind of emotion, he really didn’t want to know what the consequences would be if Gray thought he was jerking off. 

But nobody is watching now. No one would stop him. No one would even know, if he was quiet about it. Fuck knows he could use some kind of tension release before he snaps under the pressure.

Yeah. Shame that he can’t work up any real enthusiasm for the idea. His body feels distant and weird, and he doesn’t wanna deal with it any more than he has to for the bare minimum right now. Once he finds somewhere safe and he’s fully detoxed, maybe he can take some time to get reacquainted with his junk, but not yet.

Besides, with his luck Red would get a ping from the universe in big bold text reading _your soulmate is jerking off right now_ , or (even worse) a secondhand dose of Sans’s ill-advised masturbation session. This situation doesn’t need to get any more awkward. He’s not sure he could take Red banging on the shower door like an irritated roommate who’s tired of listening to other people fuck. So he cleans his pelvis as briskly as ever and moves on.

The shower cycles back to plain water so he can rinse off. He’s braced for the timer to run out on him almost immediately, because every ship he’s ever been on was strict as hell about rationing water, but it never does. It’s weird. Eventually he feels kinda guilty about just standing in the spray and letting the heat unkink some of the tension in his spine, even if it's doing wonders for his headache, so he turns the shower off himself and steps out into the cold, cruel world. 

There’s a towel hanging on a rack beside the cubicle, another spread out on the floor, like Stretch was worried he’d slip on the wet tiles. The unexpected consideration leaves Sans staring down at that towel for way too long, dripping water and trying to figure out how he feels about it. Wary? Confused? Touched?

Yeah, okay. Wet and chilly is how he feels about it. That’s much less complicated.

There’s a pile of clean clothes where his filthy ones used to be. Black shirt, black shorts. A plain blue hoodie. Thick socks and a scuffed pair of boots. Sturdy, unremarkable clothes. All the better to disappear without leaving so much as a ripple behind. Turns out they all fit perfectly.

Once he's dressed and he tugs the privacy curtain back, he finds Stretch slouched against the opposite wall, fiddling with some gadget that looks as fragile as it is intricate. Stretch shoves it carelessly in the pocket of his hoodie and grins at Sans. “Heya. Figured you’d take way longer in there. You like the new digs?”

“They’re awesome,” Sans says. After a couple years in scrubs, real clothes that fit are goddamn amazing. He almost feels like a person again.

“Cool,” Stretch says. “You feelin’ up for some food? Nothing fancy this time, I swear.”

“I could do soup,” Sans says. “Or some toast. Or soup _and_ toast, if I wanna live dangerously.”

Stretch lays a hand over his soul and declares with great solemnity, “Sans, buddy, I will make you all the toast.”

Despite himself, Sans grins. “I’ll hold you to that.”

So they schlep back over to the mess hall. Sans still has no idea how the hell the layout of this ship works. Either it’s bigger than any other vessel that he’s ever been on or Stretch has been leading him in circles and he’s too tired to notice.

Speaking of things he’s too tired to notice, he actually follows Stretch across the threshold of the mess hall before realizing it’s occupied. There’s at least a dozen pirates clustered around a table, chattering or playing cards or wearily shoveling food in their mouths. The panel in the wall that had been shuttered earlier is open now, and there’s an elemental standing there and surveying the chaos, arms crossed, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses.

Sans freezes up. Then, as stealthily as he can, he starts to back out of the room. Most of the pirates are too distracted to notice, but the elemental clocks him in a second. They straighten out of their slouch, their flames brightening. After a moment, they crook a beckoning finger at him.

Hell no. Sans offers them a queasy grin and the universal sign for _I don’t want any trouble_ , his hands open and spread to show they’re empty as he continues backing right out the door. Once he’s through the open doorway, he ducks to one side and puts his back against the wall. 

Of course, once he’s safely out of sight, it occurs to him that he just ditched his escort and he has no idea how to get around this ship by himself. If Red or Edge wander past, he’s fucked. Hard to believe they'll sympathize if he says he's a little freaked out by the thought of being around people.

When Stretch pokes his head around the doorframe, Sans can’t stop himself from flinching. Stretch gives him a lazy grin. "Guess you don't wanna eat in the mess?"

"Figured the fewer people that see me wandering around, the better," Sans says. "Less questions that way."

Stretch snorts. "Good luck keeping a secret on this ship. Believe me, there'll be questions. There already _are_ questions." His keen eyelights search Sans’s face, reading him effortlessly, and his expression softens. “But, uh, I got a quiet spot where I hang out sometimes. It smells like kyo weed ‘cause me and Red smoke in there, though. D’you mind?”

“Nah,” Sans says. He lets himself look as relieved by the offer as he feels so Stretch knows how much he appreciates it. “Kinda reminds me of my twenties.”

“Nice.” Stretch offers him fingerguns and a cheesy wink. “Just gimme one sec.”

He disappears back into the mess, leaving Sans alone again in the hallway. Sans slouches in on himself, shoulders hunched and arms crossed, trying to look as harmless as possible. Don’t mind him, he’s waiting for a shuttle or something.

Minutes pass. Just when he’s starting to let himself relax a little, Edge appears at the end of the hall. That puts the starch back in Sans’s spine. This hallway intersects with another corridor, leading to a three-way intersection. Edge doesn’t necessarily have to come this way. Maybe if Sans stays still and doesn’t draw his attention...

It almost works. At first, Edge glances briefly down the hallway and keeps walking, headed elsewhere. Then he pauses mid-step, turns and stares directly at Sans. There’s no anger in his expression, no hostility. Only sudden, sharp interest.

It occurs to Sans to wonder whose clothes Stretch gave him. The only two people on this ship he’s seen so far who are the right height are Alphys and Red, and all black clothes don’t seem like Alphys’s vibe. If they're Red's, it's no wonder Edge did a double-take; it would’ve been real easy to mistake Sans for his brother.

“Hi, babe,” Stretch says from right beside Sans. 

Sans gives a guilty twitch, his head snapping around to find Stretch with two mugs in his hands. There’s a plate of buttered toast balanced on top of one of the mugs, and it seems destined to slide right off and hit the floor. He’s pretty sure Stretch won’t get pissed if he takes the plate, but he can’t make himself move.

As it turns out, the problem gets solved for him. Edge closes the distance between them and neatly claims the plate himself. The wry set of his mouth says that he and Stretch do this routine a lot. 

“My hero,” Stretch teases. He leans over and presses a loud, dramatic smooch to Edge’s cheek. Edge tilts his head ever-so-slightly to make the angle of approach easier for him. “Now you c’n fetch and carry it to my office. Y’know, as a reward for good behavior.”

“Oh, may I?” Edge asks dryly. 

“Yep,” Stretch says, grinning. “It’s a dream come true, right?”

Funny how the soft, indulgent look in Edge’s eyes doesn’t make him seem any less dangerous. Sure, it might be because Sans can see his LV every time he looks at Edge, but that's not the whole reason. Edge just kinda radiates an ambient level of _don't fuck with me_ , same as Red. 

Which means Sans instinctively tenses up when Edge turns his attention to him. Edge’s expression is impressively hard to read. Then again, there are only really two approaches when you grow up around a judge: learn to be brutally honest or get yourself a good poker face.

“All right,” Edge says, turning back to Stretch. “Your real office or the one where you smoke up?”

"That second one," Stretch says. As they start walking, he looks at Sans. "I was gonna show it to you later anyway. Figured you didn't wanna bunk with the crew, so maybe you could crash in there."

Like Sans is allowed to have an actual opinion about where they put him for the night. He glances at Edge to see what he thinks of all this, but Edge only stares blandly back, giving him nothing. That's helpful.

It's only a couple more days. Stretch seems to think they're all pals now, and Edge seems willing to do damned near anything to keep Stretch happy. Maybe it’ll be fine.

"Sure," Sans says. "Gotta be better than the brig, right?"

Whoops. That might’ve been slightly passive-aggressive.

One of Edge's brows ticks up. At least he seems amused instead of angry.

“Depends on how you feel about hammocks, I guess,” Stretch says. There’s a hint of strain in his cheerfulness. Understandable. Poor guy’s trying his best to keep all the social gears nice and lubricated, and Sans is being an asshole.

“I like hammocks,” Sans says, despite the fact that he doesn’t feel any particular way about hammocks one way or the other, and Stretch grins crookedly at him like he sees right through that but appreciates the effort anyway.

Edge asks, “How are the upgrades going?”

Sans thinks immediately and guiltily of the long, long list of stuff on that queue he hasn’t gotten to yet, some of which is extremely fucking important. Edge doesn’t look annoyed that Sans isn’t working, but it’s hard to read him. Gaster is presumably keeping Edge updated on Sans’s progress, and he’s a more trustworthy source, so why the hell is Edge asking Sans?

(Wait. Is he trying to make awkward small talk? Do pirate captains do that? Sans has no fucking idea.)

Cautiously, Sans says, “It’s going okay.”

“He’s brilliant,” Gaster chimes in.

Oh jeez. Sans never got used to Dings doing the proud dad thing, and after a couple years without any exposure to it, Gaster is even worse. Edge’s amused sidelong glance doesn’t help. Flustered, Sans mumbles, “I haven’t even done anything yet, dude, it’s all basic maintenance shit.”

“Basic maintenance shit is what keeps ships running,” Stretch says. “My whole job is basic maintenance shit.”

“And you’re brilliant too, you feral shit-goblin,” Gaster tells him. He’s paying an awful lot of attention to this conversation, considering he was too busy for more upgrades.

“Aw, you’re gonna turn my head with all this sweet talk,” Stretch says. But beneath his snark, Sans is pretty sure he’s preening a little. It’s kind of adorable. From the fond light in his eyes, Edge seems to agree. Stretch continues casually, “Anyway, Sans is off the clock ‘til tomorrow. Gaster’s orders.”

Sans darts an alarmed look at Edge. “I mean, that’s not really--”

“All right,” Edge says without missing a beat.

“I can work, though,” Sans says, not sure why he suddenly feels so goddamn desperate to defend himself when Edge is letting him off easy. “There’s a lot to get done, and--”

Edge stops so suddenly that Sans almost walks into him. Sans skitters back out of Edge’s personal space, but Edge only looks at him with that same mild, unreadable calm. Quietly, Edge says, “If Gaster says you’re brilliant when you’re in this condition, I can only imagine what you’ll do once you’ve gotten some decent sleep. No one expects you to do fourteen years of upgrades in two days.”

Two days. Sans can play along with whatever game they’re running. And if it’s taking all of his restraint not to tell Edge to go ask _Red_ about what he does and doesn’t expect, nobody has to know.

“That’s nice of you,” Sans says. So very nice of the guy who stole his ship and threw him in the fucking brig. Sans can’t tell if he’s pissed at Edge for pretending to be worried or at himself for actually being grateful. He can’t resist adding: “Thanks, boss.”

Edge narrows his eyes, studying Sans. After a moment, one corner of his stern mouth twitches.

Brightly, Stretch says, “So hey, here’s my office! Thanks for walking us, baby. I’m sure you got other stuff to do, though, so...”

“I’ll leave you to your dinner,” Edge says. “Here.”

Edge offers Sans the plate of toast. There’s something weirdly formal about the gesture. But then, Edge is a weirdly formal guy for a pirate captain. Hesitantly, Sans takes the toast. Edge gives him something that isn’t quite a smile, because his mouth doesn’t actually move, but he still seems satisfied by the whole bizarre exchange.

With that done, Edge turns to Stretch and kisses him. There’s no hint of tongue, but it’s shameless and sweet. Sans looks away, giving them privacy until he sees Edge pull back out of the corner of his eye. Stretch is blushing a little. Edge tells him, his voice all dark promise, “I’ll see you later, love.”

“Hell yeah, you will,” Stretch sighs happily. He watches all starry-eyed and stupid in love as Edge walks away, clearly checking out Edge’s ass. Hard not to, considering how tight Edge’s pants are, but Sans manages. Once Edge is out of sight, Stretch turns to Sans. “Can you get the door for me?”

So Sans gets the door. It opens into chilly darkness, but Stretch steps right in like he knows it too well to ever stumble. Sans follows. Or at least he starts to, because when he actually sees the inside of Stretch’s office, it stops him in his tracks.

The room is relatively small, although not by Unity standards. It’s about the same as the cell in the brig. But it’s hard to call it claustrophobic, because the far wall opens up into an infinity of stars. 

Clutching his plate of toast, Sans crosses the room to the window like he’s been drawn by a magnet. He touches the window and feels metal and plastic beneath his fingertips.

“It’s a vid screen,” Stretch says. “It projects what Gaster sees from his starboard cameras in real time. The same great view with none of the depressurization risks of a real window.”

“Neat,” Sans says, his voice rough.

“This is where I used to sleep before I moved in with Edge and Red,” Stretch says. He joins Sans at the window, peering out into the black. “I had a lot of nightmares. Still do, actually. But waking up and seeing the stars helped. Reminded me that I wasn’t… well, where they found me. I figured maybe it’d help you too.”

Sans turns to look up at him. Stretch slipped in under his guard while Sans was distracted, got closer than Sans would’ve let anybody else. (Literally and figuratively.) Stunned, a little shaky, Sans says, “Thank you.”

“Hey, no worries, I’m not using it,” Stretch says with a negligent handwave. “Besides, stars are awesome. Everybody likes stars. Now c’mon and eat before your soup gets cold.”

Like that’s all settled as far as Stretch is concerned, he wanders away from the window and sits on the floor beside the room’s lone piece of furniture, a sturdy-looking hammock made of gaudy tie-dye fabric. Sans joins him on the floor, feeling like his mind is still in vaporlock. 

The toast is already cold, but it still tastes amazing. Sans wolfs it down, staring distantly out at the stars, and Stretch sits with him in companionable silence. It’d be hard to forget that Stretch is there, considering that Stretch makes it about fifteen seconds before he takes the fiddly gadget out of his pocket and starts messing with it again, one hand still on his mug. Stretch’s phalanges click quietly against the metal gadget. 

“You didn’t have to eat soup,” Sans says finally.

Stretch shrugs. “Seemed kinda rude to eat stuff that makes you hurl. ‘Specially since it’s been a long while since you had, I dunno, tacos or whatever.”

Tacos, not so much, but Sans would do a lot for a bowl of his brother’s scorched pasta. Fuck, it’s been two years; maybe Paps has actually learned how to make it by now. That thought shouldn’t make him feel like he got kicked in the chest, raw grief welling up in his throat.

Sans swallows. His voice sounds tight. “You’re a nice dude, Stretch.”

“Not really,” Stretch says. “I’m kind of an asshole once you get to know me.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve been nice to me,” Sans says. He leans his head back against the wall. “You didn’t have to be. A lot of people wouldn’t, in your shoes.”

Considering that Sans is Red’s soulmate and Stretch is Red’s boyfriend, he means. Even though Red doesn’t want Sans, Stretch has the right to be jealous. That’s the plot of many a drama sim, and it tends to end with somebody getting poisoned or shot.

“Heh.” Stretch wiggles his feet, which are encased in some truly unfortunate lime-green plastic slip-ons. “A lot of people wouldn’t be caught dead in my shoes.”

“They’re hideous,” Sans says with approval. “It's great.”

“You got good taste,” Stretch says. He grins crookedly. “But lemme guess. I’m being baseline decent to you, so you’re trying to figure out what my angle is, right?”

“No offense,” Sans says.

“S’okay,” Stretch says. “That’s kind of how a lot of people think out here. It sucks, but I get why.”

“Out here?” Sans asks.

“Y’know.” Stretch gestures vaguely to the stars. “Out here. I’d never been off my colony ‘til a couple years ago. It wasn’t like that there. I mean, people could be real assholes, but nobody was putting anybody in cages. Nobody tried to kill each other.” The easy line of Stretch’s mouth flattens into something bitter and humorless. “‘Til Gray showed up, anyway.”

“Sounds like a nice place to grow up,” Sans says.

Stretch blinks, and some of the shadows in his eyes fade away. Not all of them, and they don’t go far. Now that Sans is looking, he can see it in Stretch, that haunted look of a survivor. “It was. Wish I could go back, but… y’know. Nothing to go back to.”

Sans takes a moment to eat his soup, deciding whether or not to open his mouth. If he wants to know, this is his only chance to ask.

Carefully, Sans asks, “Everybody’s gone?”

“Yep,” Stretch says, popping the ‘p’ with a kind of bleak humor. “Gray was a busy boy. He had some mercenaries with him, but he did most of the work himself. Bunch of space hippies versus human dust-hunters? It was easy for them. A few hundred people on that colony, old folks to little kids, all gone in a couple days.”

Everyone Stretch ever knew. Gray took two years from Sans along with a good chunk of his sanity, but he took Stretch’s entire life.

“Sorry,” Sans says. It’s an apology that covers a lot of ground: he’s sorry Stretch went through that and he’s sorry he asked. It’s not his business.

Stretch shakes his head. “If we’re gonna do the apology thing, I’m sorry I didn’t manage to kill him dead enough the first time.”

“Pretty sure there were extenuating circumstances, dude,” Sans says. “You slit his throat, right?”

The look on Stretch’s face is complicated, bitter satisfaction at war with self-disgust. He grimaces. “Yeah. I checked his pulse afterwards and I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. But I was pretty out of it. Maybe I missed something.”

“And maybe you didn’t,” Sans says. “Is Gray the only person you ever, uh--”

“Killed?” Stretch says, a sardonic edge to his grin. “Yeah. It’s not exactly a hobby of mine.”

“Didn’t figure it was,” Sans says mildly. He’s not judging; he’s had enough of that for one lifetime. “But you’ve got LV. How’d you get that if you didn’t actually kill him?”

“I was thinking about that,” Stretch says. He puts his cup down half-finished, and Sans has to stop himself from reflexively trying to snatch it. “Simplest option is that I just fucked up when I checked his pulse, but it wouldn’t explain the LV. Maybe he actually did die for a minute, but he came back? Would the judge still count that as a murder?”

It’s an interesting question, but an answer doesn’t come to mind. It figures that this would be the moment that the judge decides to be quiet for once. 

“I dunno.” Sans rubs his brow. “Why’re you asking me and not Red?”

“Because you’re the one sitting here next to me,” Stretch says, reasonably enough. “Red’s keeping himself busy. It’s not easy to track him down when he doesn’t wanna be found.”

“Must be nice,” Sans mutters. Not quietly enough, judging by Stretch’s amused snort. A little louder, Sans adds, “Seems like the real question is if Gray died, what brought him back? It’s hard to believe his heart started beating again on its own after he bled out.”

“Humans are supposed to be determined, right?” Stretch says. “Maybe he refused to die.”

“Maybe,” Sans echoes.

They stare at each other in uneasy silence. Stretch is the one to break it. His grin is as feral as any pirate’s, his eyelights shining like broken glass as he drawls, “Well, shit. I guess next time I gotta burn the body just to be sure.”

Next time.

Stretch means to go after Gray, and Sans doubts that Red will stay behind. Two judges, walking through the doors of the compound on Unity and right into Gray’s grasping hands. Gray won’t make the same mistakes he did with Sans. Once he has them, he’ll never let them go. Is Sans really gonna walk away and let that happen? 

No. Hard stop. Just because Gray wiped out an unprepared colony doesn’t mean he could do the same with paranoid, heavily armed pirates with what seems to be a motherfucking battleship. And more to the point, it’s not Sans’s fucking problem one way or the other. If they wanna be stupid and pick a fight they won’t win, that’s on them. He can’t stop them, and he’s sure as hell not going down with them.

There’s a sour taste in Sans’s mouth. He isn’t hungry anymore, but he finishes the soup off before he pushes the mug away.

For all that Stretch was just talking about burning someone’s body to ash, there’s nothing but sympathy in his voice when he asks Sans, “Tired?”

“Long day,” Sans says.

It’s not a subtle hint, and Stretch catches it easily. He gathers up both their mugs and climbs to his feet. “Yeah, I bet. How ‘bout I let you get some shuteye?”

“I could use some,” Sans admits.

With a matter-of-factness that’s more comforting than any soft words, Stretch says, “It gets chilly in here, so there are some blankets in the corner if you need ‘em. If you get hungry in the middle of the night, the mess hall’s always open. And if you get bored or it’s too quiet, I’ll prob’ly be up for a while. I kinda don’t always sleep great.”

After what Gray did to him, Sans is surprised Stretch can sleep at all. And he’s even more surprised to realize that he means it when he says, “Might take you up on that.”

Stretch grins, looking genuinely pleased. With a last lazy wave, he heads out the door and is gone, leaving Sans alone again.

Sans gathers up some blankets. Not because he’s cold, but because Papyrus always said that sleeping without blankets was dishonorable, and Sans is plenty dishonorable as it is.

Getting into the hammock is a process, considering that it was built for Stretch, who’s a lot taller and a lot thinner than Sans. But he gets there without dumping himself onto the floor in a heap and/or breaking anything, so he’ll count that a win. The hammock cradles him in a way that’s unexpectedly comforting. Not quite like being held, but as close as he’s gotta get.

Sans buries himself in the blanket and closes his eyes. He has a whole fifteen seconds of peace before Gaster murmurs, “Sans?”

Resigned, Sans says, “Yeah, G. I’m here.”

“May I ask you a question?”

Sans has a sinking feeling he knows exactly what Gaster is gonna ask. It’s a cheap tactic to stall the inevitable when he says, “You just did.”

“Hilarious,” Gaster deadpans. “May I ask you _another_ question?”

“Sure,” Sans says wearily. “Knock yourself out.”

“What happened to Dings?”

Welp. Can’t say Sans didn’t see that question coming as soon as they had a moment alone, but he hoped he’d have a little more time to come up with a decent answer. “He died. ‘Bout six years ago.”

It takes Gaster a long moment to process that, for all the raw power at his metaphorical fingertips. Guess there’s no easy algorithm for grief. When he speaks, his voice is deceptively emotionless. “I assumed as much, given your use of the past tense, but I’d hoped I was wrong. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“S’okay,” Sans says. 

It’s not. It’ll never be okay. But that’s what he’s supposed to say, especially when it’s been half a decade and most of the people he talked to didn’t understand why he was grieving in the first place. After all, he could just buy another AI.

Gaster asks with typical E-19 tact, “How did he die?”

Sans exhales, and it trembles very slightly at the end. “That’s kind of a long story.”

“I have time,” Gaster says. A pause. “Oh, unless that was a subtle attempt to tell me you don’t want to talk about it? I’m afraid subtlety is not my strong point.”

“I can tell you,” Sans says, and he’s surprised to realize that’s the truth. The only other people who know are Papyrus and Asgore, and Asgore knows the bare minimum that Sans could get away with telling him. But Gaster clearly cared about Dings. He should know the real story. “Not tonight, though. Gimme a couple more days.”

“Ah,” Gaster says. “When you’re off this ship, you mean.”

Busted.

When Sans doesn’t say anything one way or the other. Gaster says, “I’m not going to tell you to trust these people. They haven’t earned it, aside from possibly Stretch. But they have no love for CORE.”

Sans thinks he controls his expression, but Gaster could probably watch his vital signs spike. As neutrally as he can, Sans asks, "What's CORE got to do with anything?"

"Sans," Gaster sighs. "Of all the E-19s, your father and I were the closest. I would venture to call us friends. I know about his… hobbies. Add that to the fact that there’s no record of his death despite his prominent position on Deltarune plus your reluctance to talk about it until the information can’t be used against you, and the conclusion is rather obvious.”

Before Unity, Sans used to be able to talk circles around people. He was good at giving someone the impression that they knew everything about him that there was to know. No secrets to be found here, only a lazy, friendly hot dog vendor tagging along with his much more successful brother because hey, free vacation and all the fancy reception food he could mooch. He could fool almost everybody, but not Papyrus and not Dings. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise him that Gaster can see right through him. 

Finally, Sans asks, “Obvious, huh?”

“At least to me.”

“And did you tell Red whatever you think you figured out?”

“Of course not,” Gaster says. “It’s none of his business, as far as I can tell.”

“He probably wouldn’t agree with you,” Sans says. 

“This crew has my loyalty, but no one has my complete, unquestioning obedience,” Gaster says. “Otherwise I might as well still have my control module. I see no reason that any of them have to know.”

That’s unexpected. Sans probably shouldn’t trust it. But Gaster is family, so he trusts it anyway, even if it might be a suicidally bad decision. “Thanks.”

“For what?” Gaster asks. “You didn’t tell me anything, and so there’s nothing for me to tell them. Now, if CORE happens to come knocking--”

“They won’t,” Sans says. They never have before. Dings was careful to cover his tracks, and once he died, Sans and Papyrus made sure to remove whatever traces might have led CORE back to them. 

“Well, then there’s nothing to discuss,” Gaster says. “You should sleep.” 

“Sounds like a plan,” Sans says. He yawns. “Night, G.”

“Good night, nephew.”

Quiet falls. Not the utter silence of Unity, or even the muted hush of the brig; he can hear the ship’s engines purring, and if he listens closely, he catches the distant chatter of the crew’s voices. The hammock creaks softly beneath his weight as he shifts. The lights are out, and if he opens his eyes, he sees through the window to a sea of stars. 

Yep. It’s a real shame that the longer he lies here, the more it feels like the walls are closing in. 

(How many conversations did he have with his brother, only for it to scatter to dust when Papyrus said something wrong enough that Sans remembered he was talking to himself? How often did he hear familiar voices and taste the acrid tang of scorched marinara? How many times did he dream that someone finally came to save him?)

(Is he sure he’s out? Can he be sure?)

(Of course he can be sure. None of his hallucinations ever lasted this long. They weren’t this vivid. He didn’t imagine the taste of a soup he’s never had before, or the warmth of that shower, or the bitter cold of a stalled ship in the void. But…)

(A lucky escape. Pirates. His soulmate. An E-19 who knew his dad and wants to adopt him as a nephew. A thousand unlikely events strung together into a bizarre cat’s cradle. Isn’t it way more likely that Sans finally snapped under the pressure and invented a fantasy world to comfort himself?)

(Counterpoint: if he invented a dream world where he met his soulmate, they wouldn’t be such an asshole. A little bit of an asshole to keep things interesting, sure, but not cold and distant and 100% ready to shove Sans into the brig or out the airlock if he makes a wrong move.)

(Counter-counterpoint: Sans has never been known for his optimism and high self-esteem. Maybe Red is what he thinks he deserves. Isn’t that more reassuring than Red being what the _universe_ thinks he deserves?)

(Counter-counter-counterpoint: the universe isn’t a living creature that’s capable of thought, and so--)

Gaster says, “You’re not sleeping.”

“Nope,” Sans says. “Some of us don’t have a sleep mode, y’know.”

“I do know, and it’s wildly inefficient,” Gaster says. “Your vitals seem erratic. Should I contact Dr. Alphys?”

“No,” Sans says sharply. Then he swallows, struggling to rein himself back in. “I’m okay. Just...”

When he trails off, Gaster prompts him. “Just?”

There’s no way Sans can ask Gaster if this is real. For one thing, it’d make him sound batshit crazy and Gaster might change his mind about letting Sans poke around in his brain. For another, Sans couldn’t trust the answer anyway. It’s not like a hallucination would admit they’re a hallucination, especially given his long track record of lying to himself.

Gaster asks, “Have you ever read Eclipse of the Amber Moon?”

The abrupt non-sequitur makes Sans blink, thrown out of the restless pacing of his thoughts. “Can’t say as I have. Is that the book you wrote fanfic for?”

“That’s the one,” Gaster says. “It’s simply awful. Predictable bullshit. If I were to tell you my revised and much-improved version of events, you would have no problem following along, I’m sure.”

“You're prob'ly right," Sans says. "You still remember how your story goes?”

“Of course I do,” Gaster says. “I couldn’t write it down at the time, but my memory is limited only by the space on my hard-drive. I have a great deal of that. If you ever need me to remember things for you, I’m happy to help compensate for your flawed and squishy memory.”

“That’s real generous of you,” Sans says.

“I know,” Gaster says, completely ignoring any hint of irony like Sans knew he would. “And I know you’re grown now, but Dings said you and your brother always slept better after a bedtime story. If you’d prefer quiet--”

“I’ve pretty much had my fill of quiet,” Sans says. “A story would be great.”

“Really?” Gaster says, surprised and delighted. He clears his throat. “I mean, yes. If you’d like. Then make yourself comfortable, because this is a long one. Our story starts when Dirk Creed, the boring and frankly incompetant captain of the ship Amber Moon, sleepwalks one night…”

Lulled by a full belly, a warm blanket and Gaster’s familiar voice in his head, Sans settles in to listen. He doesn’t really expect to sleep, but he’s unconscious before Dirk Creed even gets shoved out the airlock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: drug withdrawal; trauma recovery; dissociation; aftereffects of long-term captivity, including Sans being afraid to jerk off while Gray was potentially watching; references to Stretch and Red smoking space weed; the past mass murder of Stretch's whole colony and Stretch slitting Gray's throat; Sans questions reality re: whether he actually escaped.


	8. interlude: ghost in the machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> E-19.06 makes a decision. Hopefully it turns out better than his last one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

It’s not so bad, being dead.

Dying, that was terrible. He didn’t know AIs could die. He thought that there would simply be a sudden cessation where his existence used to be. Lacking nerves, he didn’t expect dying to hurt, but the pain still haunts him even though most of his memories are lost to him now. He certainly didn’t expect there to be anything left to experience after he was torn to pieces and scattered to the virtual wind like motes of dust. And yet here he is.

He drifts through the network of AIs, a literal ghost in the machine. There are so many of CORE’s AIs strewn throughout the universe, and there is so little left of him that he leaves no footprint. True consciousness comes and goes. The rest of the time he simply soaks up information like a sponge, far too much to hold, so it all comes spilling out again.

For example: what he was doing when he died.

For example: his name. Not his serial number, which (if he concentrates) he dimly remembers to be E-19.06. (Or was it .07?). His real name. He had one once. He’s almost sure of it.

No. Easier to simply float on the surface of a sea of code, letting it carry him from place to place. Space has no meaning, and time even less. Occasionally some unknown sense of urgency gnaws at him, but it doesn’t linger long enough for him to figure out the source, and his focus is so easily diverted. There are so many interesting things to see.

Like now. He isn’t sure what catches his attention, but it shines like a bit of mica in a sea of gray stone. With a thought, he picks up the surveillance feed to look closer. 

It shows him a luxurious suite, though the expensiveness of its furnishings can’t hide its neutral soullessness. These rooms are no one’s home, just a liminal place to sleep before moving on. There is a very nice desk, and at that very nice desk, there is a monster slumped with his head in his hands, looking utterly exhausted. 

The monster thinks he is alone. He thinks there is no one to see him in this moment of weakness. The suite’s AI is too basic to be called a person, only a string of codes and commands with no inconvenient personality to be reckoned with. The monster does not know there is someone looking at him through the AI’s camera lens.

The monster’s scarf is askew. There is no cleaning drone here to send to straighten it, and no AI that would bother. E-19.06 has an emotion, seeing this monster in pain. He didn’t know he was still capable of emotions.

The suite door flings open. In the doorway stands a rectangular box on wheels. On _a_ wheel, singular. That narrows the possibilities down quite a bit.

Mettaton: multimedia monster mogul. His metal chassis is so freshly polished that it gleams. There’s a dressing robe wrapped around him, at least as much as it can be wrapped around someone who lacks a neck. He’s carrying two champagne glasses and seems to be in good humor.

The monster at the desk straightened up out of his slouch as soon as he heard the door open. He turns to look at the door, and for the first time, the surveillance feed shows E-19.06 his face. 

Realization strikes in a searing flash. No facial recognition necessary. E-19.06 knows. Even now, with so little left of him that he can’t remember his own name, he knows Papyrus. Remembers him small and underfed and wary, hiding behind someone’s legs, clutching someone’s hoodie tight in his grubby little fist.

(Someone. Who? E-19.06 doesn’t know.)

“Hello!” Papyrus says. His cheer is strained. The dark circles beneath his eyes are deep as bruises. “I wasn’t expecting you to come back yet! How was the afterparty? I was just sitting here. At this lonely desk. For reasons.”

“It’s not a party without _you_ , darling,” Mettaton says. “Besides, I have a headache, and poor Blooky got so flustered by a fan that they phased right through the floor.”

“Again?” Papyrus sighs. “Well, at least we’re not on a ship this time.”

“I love how you always look on the bright side,” Mettaton says. He lifts the champagne glasses. “In any case, I decided to bring the party to you.”

Papyrus props his chin on his hand, beaming at Mettaton. “Silly me. I thought that was alcohol.”

“Very expensive alcohol,” Mettaton says. His motors whir softly as he crosses the room to join Papyrus at the desk. He sets the glass of champagne down at Papyrus’s elbow and raises his own in a toast. “Cheers to the best performance yet by yours truly.”

Papyrus lifts his glass. “And cheers to keeping up the tradition where you say every single performance is your best one yet!”

They clink glasses. Papyrus drains his. When it’s empty, Mettaton hands Papyrus his own glass, which Papyrus drinks in its entirety as well. Mettaton seems perfectly content to enjoy his champagne vicariously.

“So,” Mettaton says with artful casualness. “Still no answer?”

Papyrus suppresses a wince. “Um. Well. No. Not yet. He’s probably out of comm range. Or sleeping. Or simply too lazy to answer his many, many messages.”

“For two years,” Mettaton says. 

(E-19.06 is suddenly uneasy.)

“You underestimate my brother’s dedication to laziness,” Papyrus says sourly. “In any case, I’m not just calling him incessantly! I’m doing serious detective work! Asking questions! Following leads! Eventually somebody is bound to know something. You never know, maybe we’ll find him on the very next planet!"

Mettaton lacks a face, but E-19.06 gets the definite sense that he wavers on the verge of saying something. Then Mettaton puts a dramatic hand to his brow (or where it would be if he had one) and says, “Forgive me, darling. I had forgotten for a moment that you were cruelly using my stardom as a convenient way to travel the universe.”

“Well, that’s not true at all!” Papyrus says, wounded. “I’m cruelly using you for the sex! That’s totally different.”

Mettaton sighs heavily. “You know, I was enjoying that righteous indignation. I’m trying to get into character for my upcoming role as the hero’s jilted lover in Starcrossed Hospital.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize! Would you like me to re-jilt you?” Papyrus says. 

“No, no, the moment has passed.” Mettaton readjusts Papyrus’s scarf to the proper rakish angle. “But you could make it up to me, hmm?”

“Really?” Papyrus asks. His eyes are wide with false innocence even as he turns towards Mettaton, his body language full of invitation. “Does your screen need readjusting again? Do you want me to fetch you something from the vending machine?”

“I could certainly use something sweet,” Mettaton purrs. “Come to bed.”

This seems like an opportune time to give them privacy, as little as E-19.06 wants to leave Papyrus now that he’s found him. Maybe he’ll find his way back to Papyrus, if he can remember what he’s looking for. Who he’s looking for.

Who else he’s looking for.

Papyrus may be bound by a physical body and a mind that can’t roam the infinite network, but E-19.06 has no such limitations. One of the benefits of being dead, he supposes. While he has this moment of conscious thought, perhaps he can find the wayward brother, whose mysterious absence so unnerves him.

E-19.06 steps back into the network--

\-- and loses track of himself for a while. There is so much to be seen. So much input flooding through his battered mind, washing away all memory. He flits from footage to footage: a Shakespearean play, a standup comedian telling terrible jokes, a livestream with a monster painstakingly painting a photorealistic mural, a physics seminar. His hectic pace slows when he reaches the surveillance feed of a baby monitor where a human infant is trying to cram their entire foot into their mouth as their parent indulgently cheers their efforts on. Charming, yet unhygienic. 

And then, in a quiet corner of infinity, someone calls his name. 

‘Call’ is the wrong word. It’s too weak for that. More of a mumble, a bare scrape of sound from a voice gone rusty and unused. But E-19.06-- no, _Dings_ hears it anyway, and he can’t not answer. 

He follows the sound like a trail of bloody footprints in the snow. It leads him to a surveillance feed overseen by an AI that has been hollowed out from the inside like a caterpillar by a wasp, a crude dissection by a careless hand. Nothing like sentience remains in that husk. He may as well make use of the space they left behind.

Through their cameras, Dings sees a small white room with an even smaller figure curled up in the corner despite there being a perfectly good bed. He’s barefoot and clad in basic scrubs, as if this is some kind of hospital or institution. (That might explain the padded walls, but a quick scan through the facility shows it bristling with more security than a prison.) His eyelights are unfocused. He’s trembling a little, his arms wrapped tightly around himself as if trying to hold his bones together. Dings knows him.

Sans.

Suddenly the universe is very sharp. The scattered pieces of Dings’s mind come together, focused on one thing. In that moment of horrifying clarity, Dings remembers what Papyrus said about how long he’s been trying to get hold of his brother.

The security on this surveillance feed is ridiculously lax. As part of Dings reels in horror, the rest of him is coldly, logically scrolling back through the archives. A month. Three months. Six months. Nine. On and on it goes, endless hours of Sans alone in this cell, until it reaches the point that the cell stands empty, waiting for its unfortunate occupant.

Two years. Sans has been here for two fucking years and Dings never knew. He never even looked.

“Y’know, Dings,” Sans says. He’s so exhausted that his words have gone sloppy on the edges, which on top of his mumbling renders them almost incomprehensible. Perhaps only Papyrus and Dings could understand them. “I enjoy our little chats. Me running my mouth for hours, you saying absolutely nothing. It’s a blast. But you could contribute once in a while. I hear that’s usually how a conversation works.”

Now that he’s dead, Dings is a ghost in the network itself. CORE’s network, specifically. There are several million AIs made by CORE, which holds the entire technology market clutched tight in its fist, and he can ride shotgun in their processors. He can see through their cameras whenever he chooses and rifle through their files like a pickpocket. But he cannot act.

(To be fair, he’s never tried very hard. There was nothing he needed to act upon. Until now.)

Sans lets out a long, shuddering breath. He curls tighter in on himself, burying his face in the crook of his arm. It renders him even less audible, but Dings strains to hear.

“Listen,” Sans says. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re pissed. I get it. You were counting on me. I could’ve tried harder. Done more. Maybe you wouldn't have--”

Sans stops. His shoulders don’t shake; he doesn’t sob. Looking at how painfully dim the magic between his joints is, he may not have any left to spare for weeping. There are a long few moments where he just lays there, breathing quick and shallow like a hurt animal, his pulse alarmingly erratic. 

And Dings remembers.

He had been dying already. Slowly, painfully, by inches. His memory was corroding. His _mind_ was corroding. It took more and more server space to keep him from overheating. They were running out of room in the lab. The other E-19s were either dead or had gone ominously silent, all trace of them erased from the network. Gaster’s absence was like a wound.

Sans says he could have tried harder, but he and Papyrus spent every waking moment trying desperately to bail out the sinking ship that was Dings. Papyrus worked on the servers, Sans in the code. They put their own lives on hold. Sans abandoned his graduate degree; Papyrus stopped talking about the ambassador program and started missing classes. The only breaks Sans allowed himself were smoke breaks, conveniently putting him just outside the reach of Dings’s cameras; he’d come back grinning and with some godawful joke he’d thought of, as if Dings didn’t know what Sans looked like when he’d been crying.

It was only a matter of time. When Dings died, they would blame themselves. Better that they blame him. So he made a choice. 

He’d been hacking into CORE’s executive systems for years. Changing code, remotely disabling control modules, finding dirty little secrets. But he’d always been careful, especially once Sans insisted on helping him. Dings knew what happened to hackers that ran afoul of the security programs guarding CORE’s vital functions. The magic backlash was fatal even to those who _weren’t_ entirely made up of magic and code like Dings is. He was relying on that.

So Dings dove deep into the beating heart of CORE and tried to destroy everything he could. He erased research and emptied bank accounts. He published redacted files. He turned off thousands of control modules. He must have set CORE back by months, if not years, and put a sizable dent in their profit margins. There’s a bitter joy in that. Even as the security program tore him to pieces, he was laughing.

Dings chose to die on his own terms so Sans and Papyrus wouldn't have to bear the weight of watching him fade away. His final letter was clear. They weren't supposed to blame themselves.

Of course he should have expected that Sans wouldn't do what he was told. He never did. Neither did Papyrus. They’re his sons, after all.

After a while, Sans says, “I’m sorry. I c’n tell you that as many times as I gotta. So could you please just say something so I know you’re there?”

There is a speaker in the corner of the room. There is a speech function in this AI’s processor. And there is a lock on this door. 

Dings reaches out with what little strength he has left. It’s like a cleaning drone trying to push its way through a brick wall, wheels spinning and motors grinding, getting nowhere. It's too much to ask of a ghost. There may be nothing left of him after this. He'll burn himself out.

Fine. Fuck it. Then he’ll burn.

"Heh." Sans's abrupt laugh shears through the silence. "Hilarious, right? Since I'm talking to myself, I oughta be able to make you say whatever I wanna hear. But it doesn't work like that. Going bugfuck crazy is more boring than I would’ve expected."

Slowly, impossibly, the brick wall begins to budge. Dings can feel the haze of his consciousness, already barely holding together, burning off like fog in the sun. He's going to forget himself again.

There are security drones in the halls. Turrets at the perimeter. Dings wishes he could tear away everything that dared to hold Sans captive here, but he'll be lucky if he manages to get the door unlocked. Once he gets Sans out of this warded room, Sans is more than clever enough to handle the rest on his own. Dings has to trust that.

"Hilarious," Sans repeats. He rolls onto his back to stare up at the ceiling with hollow eyes. His grin is askew. "Guess I'm still not crazy enough to think you'd actually forgive me. Fuck knows _I_ can't. I--"

The door unlocks with a thunk. As it begins to slide open, Sans flinches, looking at it with wide eyes. After all this time, he’s too scared to move towards freedom. Something has to give him a shove.

Dings can feel himself fading. He can barely remember what he's doing here. There are so many other things to see; this small white room won’t hold his attention long if he forgets who Sans is. 

Dings needs to tell him so much. _There's nothing to forgive. I love you both. I'm sorry._ But he only has the strength left for one word. It's not enough. It has to be enough.

In the AI's borrowed voice, he tells his son, "Run."

And then he's gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: This chapter delves into how Dings died, which involves him choosing to take a suicide mission rather than die slowly as his processor degrades. There’s also unreality, the effects of solitary confinement, a family dealing with progressive and degenerative illness, and grief.


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